The site was recorded in 1957 as containing human remains, and the imminent destruction of both enclosures was flagged at around the same time. It took another four decades, and the arrival of an industrial and business park, before a proper excavation was carried out.

The dig, conducted in 1998 ahead of construction, found the base of a steep-sided, V-shaped fosse, a defensive ditch typically cut around an early medieval ringfort, measuring roughly one to 1.2 metres wide and up to 0.65 metres deep, enclosing a subcircular area of approximately 30 metres in diameter with an entrance to the north. The ditch fill was dense with animal bone, and a second fosse formed an annexe stretching from east to south. Three spreads of charcoal in the southern quadrant produced iron slag, charred cereal grains, a hone stone, and a fragment of a decorated bone comb dating to the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Burials were found just beneath the topsoil. That combination of features gave the excavators pause: normal domestic occupation would be unusual in such proximity to graves, which raised the possibility that this had been the site of an early wooden church rather than a conventional ringfort used for habitation. The second enclosure, clearly visible on the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map roughly 55 metres to the east, produced nothing despite extensive trenching, its physical traces apparently lost entirely before the spade ever reached it.