The irony is hard to ignore: the site had been carefully skirted by a modern infrastructure project just a decade earlier, and then undone by a different kind of earthwork entirely. A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a type of Bronze Age burnt mound, typically formed from the accumulated debris of a cooking method that involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and repeating the process until the cracked and spent stones formed a characteristic mound around the trough. These sites are extraordinarily common across Ireland, found in low-lying, often waterlogged ground, and Cloontumper is no exception.

The site came to light in 2002 during archaeological monitoring carried out as part of the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme. At that point the mound was intact, presenting as a sod-covered, roughly circular rise measuring approximately 12 metres by 11 metres and standing 0.75 metres high, with a slight central depression that likely marked the position of the original trough. Because the mound lay just outside the pipeline wayleave, the water scheme left it untouched. It remained undisturbed until the field was converted to forestry, at which point a trench bisected the southern half of the mound, exposing a dense concentration of angular burnt stone fragments packed into a matrix of black, charcoal-rich soil. That cross-section, though destructive, confirmed what the surface had always suggested. The outline of the mound is still faintly legible as a very slightly raised circular area, roughly 13 metres east to west and 11 metres north to south. Two further burnt mounds lie nearby, one approximately 15 metres to the north-east and another around 45 metres in the same direction, suggesting this corner of Mayo once saw sustained and repeated prehistoric activity along what was evidently a favoured stretch of damp, accessible ground.