That is more or less what archaeologists found when a pipe trench cut through the boggy ground near Bekan in County Mayo during infrastructure works connected to the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme between 2001 and 2002. What the trench exposed in section was a burnt mound, one of the most common yet least celebrated monument types in the Irish archaeological record.

Burnt mounds are exactly what the name suggests: accumulations of fire-cracked stone, usually found in waterlogged or marginal ground near a water source. The stones were typically heated and then plunged into water-filled troughs, and while their precise function is still debated, cooking, bathing, and industrial processing have all been proposed. The Bekan example appeared as a layer of burnt stone set in charcoal-rich peat, sitting directly above white boulder clay and sealed beneath roughly sixty centimetres of later peat. A small watercourse ran to the west, fitting the pattern closely. The burnt layer did not stop at the edge of the trench; it appeared to continue southward beneath the road. A charcoal sample taken from the deposit produced a radiocarbon date of 3700 plus or minus 45 BP, calibrated to somewhere between 2210 and 1940 BC, placing whoever lit those fires firmly in the Early Bronze Age. The site was recorded and sampled under archaeological licence during the monitoring programme, with the findings later published by Guinan in 2015.