It came to light not through any planned excavation, but during the unglamorous business of laying pipes for the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme in 2001 and 2002, when a trench cut through the road surface and exposed what lay only 0.35 metres down.

Burnt mounds are among the most commonly found prehistoric features in Ireland, and they are still not entirely understood. The prevailing theory is that they served as cooking sites, where stones were heated in fire and then plunged into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil, a method that would have left exactly this kind of residue: fire-cracked rock and charcoal accumulating in a mound beside a water source. What makes the Ballindine example particularly striking is its age. A charcoal sample taken from the layer was radiocarbon dated to approximately 2790 to 2550 BC, placing it firmly in the Late Neolithic period, a time before bronze was worked in Ireland, when communities were still shaping tools from flint. Indeed, a single flint flake was recovered from the layer alongside the charcoal. The deposit itself was modest in scale, measuring 4.6 metres in length and just 0.1 metres thick as visible in cross-section, but it appeared to continue further beneath the road in both directions, suggesting the full extent of the mound remains unseen. It overlay natural boulder clay, and once recorded and sampled, it was preserved in place rather than removed.