What emerged was not a single feature but an entire domestic landscape, compressed into an area roughly eighty metres by forty, and representing the kind of everyday life that rarely makes it into popular accounts of prehistory.

Excavations carried out by archaeologist Audrey Gahan uncovered a concentration of features that, taken together, suggest prolonged and organised habitation. There were pits, post-holes, and stake-holes, the latter being the small sockets left by sharpened wooden stakes driven into the ground, often used to define walls or fences. A circular house structure with a diameter of around ten metres was identified, a substantial building by the standards of the period. Alongside it were several ring-ditches, which are circular earthen features that can indicate the sites of former round houses, burial mounds, or ritual enclosures, and an open-ended rectangular structure whose precise function is less easy to pin down. Large quantities of Bronze Age pottery were recovered across the site, placing the occupation broadly within a period stretching from around 2500 to 500 BC, though the pottery assemblage would allow for greater precision. The findings were published in the 2004 volume of excavation reports compiled by Isabelle Bennett.

Ballynabarny does not have the profile of better-known Wicklow heritage sites, and there is nothing visible at ground level to indicate what lies beneath. The significance of the site rests almost entirely in what the excavation revealed rather than in any surviving monument, which makes it an important reminder that the archaeological richness of the Irish landscape is often invisible to the casual eye.