As contractors stripped the topsoil along the route, archaeologists monitoring the work began to notice features cut into the subsoil across a stretch of approximately 120 metres, on level ground with the Irish Sea visible some one and a half to two kilometres to the east.

The main concentration of features, designated Area 1, covered a compact zone of roughly 15 metres by 12 metres and included a cluster of pits, two narrow ditches, post-holes, a stake-hole, and a small subcircular hearth. The hearth, measuring under a metre across, had burned with enough sustained heat to turn the surrounding natural subsoil a dark purple-red on its eastern side, a detail that speaks to repeated or prolonged use rather than a single casual fire. Charcoal recovered from one of the pits identified ten wood species, with hazel and elm dominant and alder and ash also present, suggesting a landscape of mixed woodland being actively managed or exploited. The two ditches crossing the southern half of Area 1 appear to intersect somewhere beyond the excavated corridor, and their relationship to the pits and hearth remains unresolved. Scattered across the wider pipeline corridor were further isolated features, including a cremation pit found some 77 metres south of Area 1. That pit, roughly 60 centimetres in diameter, contained fragmented cremated bone sealed beneath redeposited subsoil, indicating a deliberate burial. Further south again, about 100 metres from Area 1, a post-hole and a tentative hearth were accompanied by flint-working debris and a fragment of worn prehistoric pottery, unidentifiable beyond its broad period.

Because all the excavated features were confined to the narrow 20-metre pipeline corridor, the full extent and nature of the prehistoric occupation here remains genuinely open. What the evidence does suggest is that the flat ground above Newcastle, looking east towards the sea and backed by the Wicklow hills to the west, was a place where people lived, worked timber, lit fires, and buried their dead at some point in prehistory. The pipeline caught only a thin slice of it.