During pre-development testing of land south of the town near Rough Point, archaeologists uncovered what appears to be a burnt mound or fulacht fiadh beneath layers of agricultural soil. The discovery came whilst examining an area already marked as having archaeological potential due to its proximity to historic sites including St Catherine’s Church, St Catherine’s Well and Cat Castle. Though fifteen test trenches were excavated across the site, most revealed only topsoil over natural marl and bedrock, along with numerous stone-filled field drains that spoke to centuries of farming activity.

The burnt mound feature, found in Trench 13, consisted of heat-shattered stones and clay; a telltale sign of prehistoric cooking sites that dot the Irish landscape. These fulachtaí fia, as they’re known in Irish, were typically used for boiling water by dropping hot stones into wooden or stone-lined troughs, possibly for cooking, bathing or even brewing.

A second excavation in nearby Glebe townland provided more detail about these ancient cooking sites. Here, archaeologists discovered a levelled fulacht fiadh that had been completely hidden beneath the topsoil. The main burnt deposit formed a low dome approximately 8 metres across, composed of black soil packed with heat-shattered stones and charcoal. At its centre lay a subrectangular trough, roughly 1.6 metres long and filled with compact black clay and larger, unshattered stones. This trough would have held the water that was heated by dropping in stones from a nearby fire, a cooking method that left these distinctive archaeological signatures across Ireland thousands of years after their last use.