The site came to light not through deliberate archaeological prospection but during works in 2007 ahead of the N9/N10 road improvement scheme between Kilcullen and Waterford. What the excavation revealed was modest in scale yet quietly significant: the partial remains of what may have been a small building, roughly three by four metres, defined by a shallow slot-trench cut into the earth. Fragments of early Neolithic carinated bowl were recovered from within it. A carinated bowl is a type of pottery characteristic of Ireland's earliest farming communities, recognisable by its angled, keeled profile, and finding sherds of it here places this slope within the earliest centuries of settled agricultural life on the island.

Radiocarbon dating of ash charcoal from the slot-trench produced a date range of 3518 to 3368 cal BC, already pushing the site back well into the fourth millennium before the common era. But a separate date taken from one of four post-holes found nearby returned an even earlier range of 3941 to 3696 cal BC, suggesting that activity on this hillside was not confined to a single episode. Something happened here, and then something happened again, at intervals perhaps spanning centuries. Ten additional pits and post-holes were identified across the excavation area, though none of them resolved into any recognisable structural arrangement. The picture that emerges is fragmentary and open-ended: a location returned to, used in ways that are no longer fully legible, overlooking a small stream to the east that may itself have had some bearing on why people chose this particular spot.