The site at Coonagh West is a fulacht fia, a term referring to a type of ancient cooking or processing site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone accumulated beside a water source or trough. What sets this particular example apart is both the density of activity concentrated in one small area and the way a natural spring appears to have been deliberately modified to serve the site's purposes.

The site was excavated by Kate Taylor, and the finds were published in 2004 and 2006. The spring itself was cut into boulder clay and, while probably a natural feature, showed signs of intentional enlargement. Roughly oval in plan and measuring 1.6 metres by 1.4 metres, it was just 0.66 metres deep, with groundwater percolating up through a stony base. The layered fills tell a quiet story of abandonment and accumulation: sandy silt at the bottom, then a thick deposit of moss, then peat and clay, with unworked wood and mammal bone appearing in the upper layers. Hazel charcoal from the lowest fill returned a radiocarbon date of between approximately 2034 and 1892 BC. Roughly 40 metres to the southwest lay a second fulacht fia, and the two sites formed part of a wider Bronze Age landscape that included a trackway and two round buildings, all uncovered during excavations along the Limerick Southern Ring Road and reported in Bermingham et al. 2013. A possible trough, oval and about 1.2 metres by 0.9 metres, was cut nearby into boulder clay; burnt stone had tipped into it from the west, and cattle bone was recovered from the peat that formed above it after the site fell out of use. A crescentic spread of burnt stone to the west of the pit, measuring 6 metres by 2 metres but only 5 centimetres thick, was likely deposited from the same sequence of activity.

The site was excavated as part of road construction works and is no longer accessible in any conventional sense; the landscape has been substantially altered by the Southern Ring Road corridor. What the excavation preserves, however, is a rare glimpse of a coordinated Bronze Age settlement: not an isolated cooking spot but a cluster of structures and features used by people who chose this particular ridge edge, close to water and apparently over an extended period spanning several centuries of the second millennium BC.