What they found instead told a quietly instructive story about how cartographic error and wishful interpretation can take on the weight of official record. The site had been designated as the location of the church of Drumkay, marked with some confidence on the first-edition Ordnance Survey map. Beneath the soil, however, there was no trace of a church at all.

The excavation, carried out in 2006 in advance of a proposed housing development, uncovered fourteen features and deposits across the site. These included field ditches dating from somewhere between AD 1000 and 1800, pits, the foundations of a masonry wall, what may have been a corn-drying kiln (a small stone structure used to dry grain before milling, common across medieval and early modern Ireland), and evidence of brick manufacturing from the 18th century. The most striking find was a substantial hearth set within a rectangular house foundation. This building had already vanished by the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the area in 1837, but its foundations were apparently still visible and were noted, incorrectly it seems, as the remains of the church. Crucially, none of the deposits that archaeologists associate with ecclesiastical sites were present: no burials, no church masonry, no structural remains of a religious character. The conclusion was uncomfortable but clear. Either the actual church of Drumkay lay somewhere outside the area tested, or the monument as recorded simply did not correspond to what the designation implied.

The story has a resolution, though it came after the fact. Subsequent excavations in a neighbouring part of the same townland did eventually locate the church and graveyard of Drumkay. The original designation had placed the monument in the wrong field. It is a reminder that even formally recorded archaeological sites carry their own history of interpretation, revision, and occasional misidentification, and that the map and the ground do not always agree.