It took a routine pre-development archaeological test on a greenfield site on the western outskirts of Ballina to reveal that a prehistoric cooking site had been quietly buried there all along. The fulacht fia at Ardoughan came to light in 2019, during works undertaken in advance of a proposed housing development, and was subsequently fully excavated by Richard Crumlish. It had left nothing visible at the surface; without that intervention, it would almost certainly have been built over without notice.

A fulacht fia is a type of Bronze Age cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a burnt mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal accumulated around a water-filled trough. The Ardoughan example followed that pattern closely. The mound itself measured roughly 8.2 metres north to south, was horseshoe-shaped in plan and open to the east, and sat directly over natural grey and cream-coloured clay subsoil. Beneath it, a rectangular trough cut into the subsoil measured approximately 1.6 metres by 1.35 metres and was filled with burnt mound material and an orange-brown clay. Three post-holes were identified in two of the trough's corners, suggesting some kind of timber structure had once stood there, perhaps a lining or a frame to hold the sides in place. Around 1.7 metres to the north-east of the trough, excavators uncovered an irregularly shaped pit with a distinctive stepped interior, its two halves at different depths, both flat-bottomed with steep sides. A shallow ditch enclosing a small oval area lay two metres to the east, its purpose unclear. No artefacts of any kind were recovered from the site. Intriguingly, a second fulacht fia was excavated just 20 metres to the north, suggesting this stretch of the Ballina slopes saw repeated use, perhaps over a considerable span of time.