A fulacht fia, as these sites are known in Irish archaeology, is a type of Bronze Age burnt mound, typically found near water and interpreted as a place where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The example at Cloghacloka in County Limerick is unusual not for its age but for its complexity: three separate troughs were identified here, each constructed with a degree of hydraulic ingenuity that the boggy ground demanded.

The site was excavated by Paul Logue under licence 98E0159, ahead of construction work on the N20/N21 Road Improvement Scheme, and the results were published in 2000. The site measured 24 metres north-east to south-west by 18 metres, and sat in marshy, low-lying ground beside the canalised remnant of a small stream. The subsoil conditions shaped everything. A compact orange clay, no more than 0.4 metres deep, overlay a gravel layer, and the base of that clay effectively marked the water table. Dig through it, and the cut would flood immediately. The prehistoric builders solved this by making shallow cuts and then building upward, raising the sides of each trough with the excavated clay subsoil to form watertight walls, in some cases packing stake-holes around the exterior to support the structure. The earliest trough, roughly 1.8 metres by 1.2 metres, contained nine large stake-holes internally, almost certainly the supports for a wooden lining. A stone surface ran west from it toward the stream. Later, a second and then a third trough were constructed nearby, each associated with small hearths, and the third trough appears to have reused part of the second as a hearth in its own right.

The site no longer exists as a visible feature in the landscape; it was excavated and recorded precisely because the road scheme would have destroyed it. What remains is in the published record, most accessibly through the excavations.ie database entry for 1998 and Logue's 2000 report. For anyone interested in fulacht fia more broadly, the low-lying, stream-adjacent terrain at Cloghacloka is entirely typical of the type, and the Limerick countryside holds numerous similar sites in comparable settings. The Cloghacloka example is worth knowing about not because it is visitable, but because the detail of its excavation record illustrates just how much practical problem-solving went into what might otherwise seem like simple prehistoric technology.