No mound, no hollow, no scatter of stone. The site only came to light during archaeological monitoring carried out between 2001 and 2002 as part of the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme, and what emerged was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet still somewhat puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia is broadly understood to be a Bronze Age cooking site, consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water trough, where stones heated in a fire were dropped into water to bring it to a boil. They cluster near streams, boggy ground, and wetland margins, and Bekan fits that pattern exactly, positioned at the junction between dry land and a deep peat deposit.

Full excavation, published by Guinan in 2015, revealed an irregular spread of burnt sandstone fragments in charcoal-rich soil measuring roughly 7.2 metres north to south and 7.4 metres east to west. The upper portion of the mound had been cut away by land reclamation at some point, which explains why nothing was visible beforehand. On the western side, an oval trough had been cut into boulder clay, measuring just over two metres long, around 1.2 metres wide, and up to 0.7 metres deep. Around its base, the lower portions of thirty-four small wooden posts or stakes survived, mostly hazel, ranging from two to four centimetres in diameter. These are thought to be the remains of a wicker lining, a basketwork insert that would have helped retain the trough's shape and perhaps slowed water loss into the surrounding clay. A single piece of struck chert was also recovered. Three radiocarbon dates from charcoal samples placed the site firmly in the Middle Bronze Age, with results converging on a range spanning roughly 1880 to 1439 BC. A second fulacht fia lies approximately 600 metres to the east, suggesting this stretch of the Mayo landscape saw repeated or prolonged use during the same broad period.