When archaeologists finally opened the ground, what they found was a circular ditch roughly twenty metres across, with a deliberately placed entrance gap of three metres facing south-east, and at the very centre of the enclosed space, a pit packed with charcoal and burnt bone. The monument had survived, just barely, as a faint trace in the subsoil.

A ring-ditch is the buried remnant of what was once a circular earthwork, often associated with funerary or ritual activity in prehistoric Ireland. The Drinan example was excavated under licence number 04E1066 ahead of a development in the area, with the findings later reported by Giacometti in 2005. The ditch itself had been badly truncated by centuries of agricultural activity and averaged only around 0.25 metres in depth by the time it was recorded. Fragments of Bronze Age pottery were recovered from the northern end of the ditch fill, helping to place the monument broadly within that period. The central pit was oval in plan, measuring approximately 1.9 metres north to south, 1.7 metres wide, and 0.45 metres deep. Its irregular shape suggested it had been cut and recut on more than one occasion, leading the excavators to propose that it served as a multiple burial pit. Small fragments of possible Bronze Age pottery were also retrieved from within this pit, consistent with the broader dating of the monument.

The site is no longer visible above ground. Like many such monuments revealed only through development-led excavation, it exists now primarily in the archaeological record rather than in the landscape. The excavation report compiled by Giacometti remains the principal source of information about the site, and the finds and records will be held as part of the national archaeological archive. For anyone with an interest in the Bronze Age dead of the Dublin region, this kind of low-profile site, easily overlooked in favour of more dramatic monuments, offers a reminder of how much ritual activity once took place across ordinary farmland.