When engineers laid the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline between 1981 and 1982, archaeologists working ahead of the trench at Kilferagh found themselves excavating what had been, some seven centuries earlier, a small and apparently self-contained agricultural settlement. At its centre was a corn-drying kiln, a type of structure common enough in medieval Ireland but rarely preserved in such readable detail.

A corn-drying kiln was a purpose-built furnace used to dry harvested grain before milling or storage, a practical necessity in a wet climate where grain could not reliably be dried in the open air. The Kilferagh example, which the pottery sherds built into its stone platform date to the late thirteenth century, was constructed with some care. Workers cut a pit roughly five metres by four into the boulder clay, then built within it a circular bowl of dry-stone walling, tapering from just over a metre in diameter at the top to eighty centimetres at the base, and standing to a height of around 1.6 metres across six surviving courses. A straight flue, some 2.2 metres long and faced with stone slabs set on their narrow ends, ran westward from the bowl and opened into a sunken yard. That yard served a double purpose: it was a working area where the kiln could be stoked, and a dump for the burnt rakings raked out of the flue. A shallow depression in the yard's north-western corner, packed with charcoal from ash and blackthorn, appears to have been the hearth from which burning embers were carried to the flue. Charred cereal remains found inside the bowl confirm the structure was used as intended. Close by stood the probable walls of a house and, just a metre to the south-south-east, a building tentatively identified as a barn, conveniently placed to receive grain straight from the kiln floor. Two parallel ditches running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east may represent the fosse, or defensive ditch, of an enclosed manorial farmstead, a type of moated agricultural enclosure associated with Anglo-Norman settlement. Medieval pottery of late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century date was found throughout the site, and the settlement appears to have been abandoned and deliberately backfilled sometime before the early fifteenth century, leaving the whole complex sealed beneath later tillage land until a pipeline route happened to cross it.