By 1985, the visible remains amounted to a slight arc of raised ground no more than 0.3 metres high and a shallow external depression; easy to walk past, easy to dismiss. It was only the threat of quarrying that prompted a proper look.

Excavation in 1992, carried out under licence ahead of the quarrying work, revealed a flattened oval enclosure roughly 25 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, defined by a low earthen bank and a narrow V-shaped ditch about 1.95 metres wide and just over a metre deep. The entrance was a simple uncut causeway on the eastern side. More striking was a feature noticed as a linear hollow running east to west across the interior before a single stone was lifted: a souterrain, the underground stone-lined passage that Early Medieval farmers sometimes built beneath or beside their ringforts, most likely for storage and concealment. This one curved for 11.3 metres through the boulder clay, reaching nearly two metres below the present ground surface. It had been constructed using two different techniques, post-and-panel work at the southern end and dry-stone walling further north, with a handful of upright orthostats near what would have been the entrance. Only a single lintel stone remained in place when excavators reached it; the passage had already been emptied and backfilled at some earlier point. Alongside the souterrain, the excavation uncovered a deep circular furnace pit with a short south-east-facing flue, its five layers of fill packed with iron slag, pointing to metalworking carried out within the enclosure. The combination of a defended farmstead, a hidden underground chamber, and an iron-smelting pit gives this otherwise unremarkable scrap of Cork pasture a quietly layered biography that its surface gave almost no hint of.