A fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological record, came to light during construction work at Charlesland, offering a brief, carefully licensed window into a prehistoric past that the new housing would otherwise have buried without comment.

A fulacht fia, in its simplest form, is a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a cooking or industrial process that involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The stones crack and shatter with repeated heating, and over time the broken, fire-reddened fragments pile up into a low horseshoe-shaped mound. They date most commonly to the Bronze Age, and they appear in their thousands across Ireland, often in low-lying, damp ground near streams or springs. The Charlesland example was excavated under licence in connection with the residential development on the site, with findings later published by Phelan in 2007. Beyond the fact of its discovery during construction, the specifics of its form, size, and associated features belong to the excavation record rather than to what survives visibly above ground today.