That grain, along with cattle teeth, skull fragments, sherds of local Meath pottery, and a plough pebble, is about as close as archaeology gets to the texture of an ordinary working day. The well itself, funnel-shaped at the top and narrowing into a shaft roughly 1.6 metres deep, sat about eight metres south of a medieval east-west road. Beside that road stood five corn-drying kilns, a threshing floor, a water-hole, and the corner of a house. The whole complex, uncovered during excavations in 2006 and 2007 ahead of the construction of the M3 motorway, represents a small but unusually complete picture of medieval agricultural processing in County Meath.

The place-name gives a misleading impression of classical grandeur. Phoenixtown is a corruption of the Irish Baile na bhfionnóg, meaning something like "town of the grey crow," anglicised in earlier documents as Finnogestown and recorded as Fenokston in a 1324 inquisition into the value of the manor of Martry. That inquisition is the earliest documentary mention of the settlement, and it names three free tenants holding a carucate of land there, roughly 300 acres: David Beg, Adam Beg, and Richard Lewati. These families were probably the people behind the agricultural enterprise the excavation revealed. The wider manorial history is tangled. The barony of Lower Navan had been granted by Hugh de Lacy to Jocelin de Angulo at the start of the Anglo-Norman settlement of Meath in 1172. By 1318 the manor of Martry had reverted to the Crown after its holder, Walter de Say, committed a felony, most likely during the Bruce campaign of 1314 to 1318, when Edward Bruce's Scottish forces caused widespread disruption across Ulster and Meath. The manor passed through several hands, reaching Miles de Verdon by 1324 and the Darcy family by 1415, while the Beg name continued to appear in documents across the fourteenth century.

The well drained eastward through a ditch that fed into the southern ditch of the road, and stones at the western end of that drain, along with stones recovered from inside the well itself, may once have formed a low wall around the opening or provided steps down into it. Carbonised plant remains from the site included wheat, hulled barley, oats, and peas, a crop profile consistent with the mixed arable farming of the Anglo-Norman midlands. The ceramics throughout were largely local Meath wares, and the site produced very little material from outside the late twelfth to fourteenth century window, suggesting it was used intensively for a relatively short period before the furrows of later ploughing cut across almost everything else.