These burnt mounds, found in their thousands across Ireland, are typically Bronze Age in date and are thought to represent cooking sites, though some researchers have proposed they were used for bathing, textile processing, or brewing. The basic principle is consistent: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and the spent, shattered stones were raked aside into a mound. Over centuries, those mounds survive long after everything else has gone.

This particular example, on low-lying ground along a gentle west-facing slope near a stream in Gardenhill, Co. Limerick, was entirely unknown until road construction brought it to light. It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and it was only identified in 2006 when archaeologist Tracy Collins carried out test trenching ahead of work on the Southern Limerick Ring-Road. Excavation that same year, led by Aidan Harte and recorded as Gardenhill Site 2, revealed a subcircular spread of burnt material measuring roughly 10.5 metres north to south and 8.4 metres east to west, with a maximum depth of just over half a metre. Beneath this lay an irregular trough, approximately 1.8 by 1.3 metres and 0.25 metres deep, filled with the same kind of burnt stony material. On the northern side of the spread, excavators uncovered a horseshoe-shaped cut that may have been dug to extract clean clay for raising the working surface. About a metre to the northwest sat a concentration of large red sandstones, matching material found within the trough, with a small burnt deposit nearby. No finds were recovered from the site, which is not unusual for fulachta fia; they rarely yield objects, only the residue of repeated, functional activity. Notably, a cremation pit was recorded approximately 35 metres to the east, suggesting this small area of field was used in several ways during prehistory.

The site is not accessible to the general public as a visitor destination; it was excavated in advance of road construction and the record now exists primarily in the form of Harte's 2009 report. Anyone with a serious interest in the findings can consult the excavation archive or the entry in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland database. The broader landscape around the Southern Limerick Ring-Road corridor saw a number of similar interventions during that period, and the Gardenhill fulacht fia sits quietly in the literature as one of many sites that only became known because a road happened to go through.