What makes the group unusual is less the monuments themselves than the circumstances of their discovery: they came to light not through a planned excavation, but as a direct consequence of a modern infrastructure project.

In 1983, fieldwalking carried out in advance of the laying of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline led O'Flaherty to record seven fulachta fiadha in the area. Fulachta fiadha, which translates roughly as "cooking places of the deer," are among the most commonly found prehistoric monuments in Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a timber-lined trough, which would have been filled with water and heated using stones from a fire. The Clohoge and Rathcash examples, however, showed no visible troughs, most likely because centuries of ploughing had reduced the sites to their base spreads of scorched material. This absence led to their formal reclassification as burnt mounds rather than fulachta fiadha. Five of the seven sites were plotted on an extract of a six-inch Ordnance Survey map. One, which lay directly within the pipeline corridor, was excavated, as recorded by O'Flaherty in 1987. The seventh monument presents a more stubborn puzzle: its precise location within the townlands remains unknown, leaving the group permanently incomplete on the archaeological record.