What it represented was a fulacht fia, the Irish term for a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped burnt mound beside a water source and one or more stone-lined or timber-lined troughs. This particular example came to light not through deliberate fieldwork but through archaeological monitoring carried out during the construction of the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme between 2001 and 2002, after which it was fully excavated.

The mound itself measured roughly nine metres north to south and eleven metres east to west, though it had not survived intact. A field drain had cut directly through its centre, and much of the eastern trough it concealed had been destroyed as a result. Two troughs in total were uncovered, cut into the underlying boulder clay. The western one was subcircular, just over a metre across and roughly half a metre deep, with narrow, regularly spaced linear features in its base that may be the traces of a decayed wooden lining. The eastern trough, where it survived, had steep sides and a flat base, and both troughs showed a small gully extending downslope from their edges, suggesting some form of overflow arrangement. Twenty-five chert artefacts were recovered, including two concave scrapers. Five charcoal samples were submitted for radiocarbon dating, and the results placed most of the activity in the Early Bronze Age, broadly between around 2273 and 1680 BC. The basal layer of the eastern trough, however, produced two dates pushing back still further, into the Late Neolithic, somewhere between approximately 2553 and 2141 BC. A second fulacht fia was identified just twenty-five metres to the east, suggesting this stretch of streambank was a place people returned to across a very long span of prehistoric time.