What lay beneath was a remarkably intact Bronze Age cooking place, known in Irish as a fulacht fia, a type of site found in considerable numbers across Ireland and typically identified by the crescent-shaped mounds of shattered, fire-cracked stone that accumulate beside them over years of repeated use.

Archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly excavated the site in 1951, and what he uncovered has become one of the more carefully documented examples of its type. At the north-east of the mound, a pit had been cut into the subsoil, large enough to hold a trough fashioned from a hollowed-out tree trunk, measuring roughly 4.1 metres long and 1.4 metres wide. The trough itself had long since rotted away, but its outline remained as a band of fine grey clay pressed into the surrounding earth. Beside it, a horseshoe-shaped hearth at the south-east end still showed the progression of its use: fires lit first directly on bare soil, then on successively laid flagged floors as the ground was improved over time. The arms of the horseshoe were anchored by upright stone slabs set into sockets, and the whole structure opened towards the trough, which is consistent with the working theory that stones were heated in the fire and then dropped into water in the trough to bring it to a boil. Two phases of occupation were also evident in the huts associated with the site: a small oval structure defined by seven post holes was later replaced by a larger circular hut, five metres across, with ten post holes marking its perimeter. By O'Kelly's calculations, the mound of burnt and discarded stone that had accumulated from all this activity originally contained 139 cubic metres of material, though ploughing had by then spread and flattened much of it across the surrounding ground.