A thin scatter of charcoal-rich material and heat-shattered stones, spread irregularly across a grey and white silty clay subsoil, is all that remained when archaeologists recorded it. No dramatic earthworks, no reconstructed timber, just the faint residue of repeated burning, enough to identify the place as a fulacht fia, the term used for a type of prehistoric cooking or industrial site found widely across Ireland. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a water trough, where stones were heated and dropped into water to bring it to the boil. Here, though, no trough was found, and the spread itself measured only around 5.2 metres along its longer axis, suggesting either that much had already been lost before excavation began, or that this was a modest example of the type to begin with.

The site came to light not through deliberate archaeological survey but as an accidental consequence of infrastructure work. Topsoil-stripping carried out during construction of Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West exposed the burnt spread in Baunreagh townland, recorded under excavation reference BGE 3/51/1. Archaeologist Brian Halpin, working under licence reference 02E0741, investigated the site once the spread had been identified. The circumstances of discovery were not favourable to thorough investigation. Pipe-laying works had already disturbed large sections of the spread before the site could be properly examined, and two large digger buckets of material had been removed from the centre, taking with them whatever features might have clarified the site's original extent or function.

Because the site was uncovered during pipeline construction and not preserved in place, there is nothing to visit at Baunreagh today in any conventional sense. The interest lies less in going somewhere and more in understanding how much of Ireland's prehistoric record surfaces, briefly, in exactly this way: caught at the edge of a mechanical dig, recorded quickly, and then absorbed into the ground again beneath new infrastructure. The excavation record compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to excavations.ie in August 2012 is the most complete account of the site that exists. For anyone interested in the archaeology of County Limerick or in how fulachtaí fia are distributed across the Irish landscape, that online record is the site now.