The site is a double penannular ring-ditch, meaning two near-complete circular trenches, one inside the other, each left deliberately open on one side rather than closed into a full ring. Both openings face east, towards the river, and that alignment appears deliberate. The inner ditch measured roughly 10.4 by 9.8 metres across; the outer reached approximately 19.8 by 16.7 metres. Together they formed a defined ceremonial or funerary space, orientated so that the Nore itself was, in some meaningful sense, part of the picture.

The excavation was carried out in advance of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road scheme, the kind of infrastructure project that, almost incidentally, has transformed our understanding of Irish prehistory by forcing investigation of land that might otherwise never have been examined. Inside the inner ditch, archaeologists found four post-holes and a large waste pit. Just outside the enclosure to the southwest lay a cluster of 17 stake-holes, two of them cut by what may have been a cremation pit, suggesting activity that was probably contemporary with the ditches themselves. The fills of both ditches contained charcoal, burnt bone, animal bone, and shells, material consistent with funerary or ritual use. Two Bann flakes, a type of worked flint associated with Mesolithic activity, turned up in the fills but are thought to be residual, carried in rather than evidence of an earlier phase on the same spot. Notably, there was no trace of a bank along either ditch and no sign that either had been recut or reworked over time. At some later point, a large medieval square enclosure was cut directly through the ring-ditch, layering a different kind of organised space over the earlier one and, in doing so, preserving the older features beneath its own boundaries.