Before a motorway was built through the area, archaeologists were given a narrow window in 1985 to excavate what had been quietly recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1843, marked as a roughly circular hachured enclosure on undulating grassland to the south-east of the Dodder valley. The hachures, a cartographic convention for showing raised earthworks, hint at what once stood here: a ringfort, the most common type of early settlement monument in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period.

The excavation, carried out by Keeley in 1985, revealed a truncated circular structure with an internal diameter of around 24 metres, defined by a bank and an external fosse, the term used for a deliberately dug defensive or enclosing ditch. Inside, the ground held the traces of a D-shaped wooden structure, a hearth, and a scatter of pits and post-holes where upright timbers had once stood. Among the finds recovered were a flint scraper and a possible loom weight, modest objects that nevertheless suggest the ordinary textures of life here: tool use, textile production, a fire burning at the centre of a timber building. The flint scraper, in particular, is a small puzzle, since flint tools are more typically associated with prehistoric activity, raising the possibility of earlier use of this ground.

The site sits in an area that has been substantially altered by later development, and the physical remains visible to any visitor today are likely to be fragmentary at best, the earthworks having been described as truncated even at the time of excavation. Those with an interest in the archaeology of the Dodder valley corridor may find it worth cross-referencing the original OS six-inch map coverage of the area alongside the 1985 excavation report to understand what once stood here and what was recorded before it was lost to construction.