The site at Charlesland is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding one or more water-filled troughs. The standard interpretation is functional and unglamorous, a place for heating water by dropping fire-heated stones into it, most likely for cooking. Finding what appears to be a musical instrument at the bottom of one of those troughs complicates that picture considerably.

The site was excavated in 2003, uncovering a burnt mound measuring fourteen metres east to west and eleven and a half metres wide, lying only twenty centimetres deep. Beneath it were four troughs, with post-holes and stake-holes scattered around them, suggesting some kind of wooden structure once stood above. One trough, roughly a metre deep, had been carefully constructed: a wattle lining, the kind of woven-branch basketwork familiar from prehistoric waterlogged sites, had been installed first, and was later replaced or supplemented with an internal lining of roundwood timbers on the east and west sides and a floor of timber planks. It was within this well-made, apparently purpose-built trough that the six yew pipes were found, laid in the base. A radiocarbon date taken from a peg used in building the trough lining places its construction somewhere between 2120 and 2085 BC, putting it firmly in the Early Bronze Age. Whether the pipes were deliberately placed there, lost, or stored for safekeeping is not something the archaeology can resolve, but their presence in a carefully finished wooden trough suggests this was no ordinary disposal.