The village was part of Sir Walter Raleigh's landholdings centred on Mogeely Castle, and for centuries after its abandonment it left almost no trace above ground. What makes it quietly remarkable is how it was rediscovered: not through chance or fieldwork in the conventional sense, but through a resistivity survey carried out in the summer of 1990, in which patches of high resistance pointed to the likely positions of house sites, and long bands of low resistance traced the courses of infilled ditches. Surface elevation measurements added further detail, suggesting enclosures where the natural slope behaved in ways that soil alone could not explain.

Excavations the following year, led by researcher Klingelhofer, confirmed what the remote sensing had implied. The most south-westerly house plot in Raleigh's village produced the badly plough-damaged remains of a rectangular stone structure, approximately twelve metres on its longer axis and eight metres on the shorter, along with a shallow pit. Sherds of sixteenth and seventeenth-century pottery and animal bones were recovered from the site, material consistent with a colonial plantation settlement of that period. Beneath the house foundations ran a curving ditch, roughly two metres wide and just under a metre deep, whose origins are less certain. It may belong to the castle complex nearby, or it may be connected with the medieval church that stands across the lane to the east, suggesting that the English settlers built over a landscape that already carried its own layered history before they arrived.