It came to light not through any deliberate search but because a gas pipeline was being laid. During topsoil-stripping for the Hollybrook-Wicklow Bord Gáis Éireann pipeline, contractors working under archaeological monitoring spotted a spread of blackened, fire-cracked stone standing out sharply against the pale brown natural boulder clay beneath. What that dark smear represented was a prehistoric cooking site, the characteristic burnt mound left by repeated cycles of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil.

Excavation of the area, roughly 6.6 metres north to south and four to five metres wide, uncovered a more complex picture than the surface material suggested. The burnt mound itself, a compact layer of shattered black stone and clay up to 0.4 metres deep, had accumulated in a shallow natural depression and effectively levelled it out. Beneath and around it, archaeologists found a curvilinear ditch of U-shaped profile, two pits including one substantial oval trough measuring 1.5 metres by 1.36 metres and 0.8 metres deep, and a curving line of twelve stake-holes extending 4.5 metres, thought to represent a windbreak or post-and-wattle fence. The ditch fill, a water-retentive silty clay, yielded decayed timber fragments containing traces of ash, hazel, alder and elm, suggesting the kind of mixed woodland environment typical of prehistoric Ireland. Two small clusters of stones between the pits were initially thought to be hearth settings, though no ash or heat-scorching of the surrounding soil was found to confirm this. Much of the western part of the site had been destroyed before excavation by the insertion of modern field drains, a frustratingly common fate for low-lying archaeological features. Radiocarbon dating results had not yet been published at the time the excavation report appeared in print in 2003.