In Donabate, County Dublin, work to widen a local road prompted a formal excavation that revealed the remains of a small medieval structure quietly buried at the base of a hill, just east of a companion building, with drainage ditches running north to south beside them both. What made the find particularly useful to archaeologists was not the walls themselves, fragmentary as they were, but the pottery sherds recovered from those ditches, dating the activity at the site to somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

The excavation, carried out under licence number 08E0155, established that the structure sat on the edge of an early medieval ditch, suggesting the spot had been in use, or at least had been shaped by human activity, long before the medieval period proper. The building itself was defined by the collapse of its rubble walls, a flagstone floor, and the remnants of a dry-stone wall running roughly three metres east to west. Dry-stone construction, in which stones are stacked without mortar, was common in early Irish building and is often a sign of relatively modest, functional use rather than high-status architecture. The site sits at the base of the hill on which both Donabate church and a tower house also stand, placing this modest structure in the shadow of buildings that would have carried considerably more local authority. The finds were documented by Kavanagh in 2011.

The site itself is not formally presented to visitors and there is nothing to mark it on the ground today, the excavation having taken place in advance of road works that presumably altered the landscape further. Those interested in the broader setting can still take in the church and tower house on the hill above, which remain visible as standing monuments in Donabate. The pottery evidence, now the most tangible record of the structure's occupation, belongs to a period when Anglo-Norman influence was reshaping settlement patterns across County Dublin, and even a modest drainage ditch beside an unremarkable outbuilding can carry traces of that longer story.