What emerged was a fulacht fia, the distinctive burnt-mound sites found across Ireland and dating broadly to the Bronze Age. The typical interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking places: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and the cracked, fire-shattered fragments accumulated over time into the characteristic spread of dark, charcoal-flecked material that archaeologists recognise today.

This particular example came to light during works associated with the Killoughter interchange on the N11 Newtownmountkennedy to Ballynabarny road scheme. It sat at the base of a west-facing hillslope and had been considerably reduced by ploughing over the years, surviving as a spread roughly 7.18 metres north to south and 6.82 metres east to west, with a maximum depth of only 0.28 metres. Beneath and to the north of that spread lay a slight hollow that may once have served as the trough into which heated stones were dropped. The site also had a close neighbour: a small stream ran just 16 metres to the west, and a more substantial fulacht fiadh complex in the same townland had been excavated by Catherine McLoughlin as recently as 2001, suggesting this corner of Rathmore saw repeated use across prehistoric time. A second monitoring site investigated around 30 metres to the south-east yielded nothing of archaeological note, which in its own way makes the proximity of two fulachta fiadh all the more striking.