What those readings eventually resolved into, once test excavation got underway, was something quietly specific: the ghostly arrangement of a small rural settlement, its yards and ditches still legible after seven centuries of silence.

The excavation, carried out under licence 08E0303, revealed an L-shaped row of sub-rectangular tofts oriented roughly east-northeast to west-southwest. Tofts are the enclosed plots typical of medieval rural settlements, each one representing the working and living space of a household, bounded by ditches and set atop a slight raised platform. The surviving building remains cluster in the southern quadrant, with a yard and back lane running to the north. Most striking is a metalled hollow trackway to the south of the tofts, running parallel to them for around 80 metres and measuring some 5 metres wide, worn down through repeated use into the ground surface. The settlement appears to have been most active between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries, though the evidence suggests either continued or renewed occupation into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Archaeologist W. Frazer, writing in 2008, proposed that the site may represent the remains of a manor farm or grange associated with Mooretown, a grange being an outlying agricultural estate managed on behalf of a larger landholding, often monastic or manorial in origin.

The site is not marked or publicly interpreted, and access is not straightforward since it lies within a zone that was subject to proposed development at the time of survey. The physical traces visible at ground level would be subtle at best, the kind of slight earthwork relief and faint hollow way that rewards a slow eye and low winter light rather than a summer visit when vegetation obscures everything. The records compiled by Christine Baker and held in the archaeological licensing system remain the most detailed guide to what lies here, and for anyone with an interest in how medieval rural landscapes were organised across the Dublin hinterland, the documentary evidence alone repays attention.