The fragments are not much to look at individually, but taken together they point to people living and working here somewhere between nine thousand and eight thousand years ago, in the centuries after the last Ice Age when Ireland was newly habitable and hunter-gatherer groups were moving through a landscape that would have looked very different from anything visible today.

The site came to light during a field-study project carried out between 1983 and 1985, when researchers identified flint artefacts characteristic of the Early Mesolithic period. Excavations followed in 1990, directed by Anderson, who opened seven trenches across a combined area of roughly 35 square metres. The work recovered over three hundred flint pieces, most of them from what is described as a ploughsoil horizon, meaning centuries of agricultural activity had churned the upper ground and displaced much of the original deposit. Some areas showed no trace of occupation at all, the evidence having been removed entirely by cultivation. The lowest-lying section of the excavation was more revealing, producing a gravel spread that appeared to be in its original position, defining a hollow with two stake-holes, though these could not be dated. Among the recovered material were blades and blade fragments, ten microliths, which are the tiny, precisely shaped flint tools characteristic of Mesolithic toolkits, including rod-shaped examples and one scalene triangle. There were also three microburins, which are the small waste pieces produced when microliths are manufactured, along with two scrapers, a single-platformed core, and a quantity of debitage, the general term for flint-working waste. The assemblage's date, roughly 9000 to 8000 years before present, rests on comparisons with similar sites rather than direct radiometric dating of the Kilcummer material itself.

What makes the clifftop location quietly suggestive is the view it would have commanded over the Blackwater valley, a natural corridor for both people and animals moving through early post-glacial Ireland. The site offers no monuments to visit, no visible earthworks or standing stones, only a landscape that once, briefly but verifiably, was home to some of the island's first inhabitants.