The cultivation trench, just over a metre wide, sliced into an ancient mound and clipped the edge of a carefully constructed wooden trough, setting in motion a proper archaeological excavation in September and October of 1991. What it had disturbed was a fulacht fia, the term used for the characteristic burnt mounds found widely across Ireland, generally understood to be outdoor cooking or processing sites where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough until it boiled.

Excavator J. O'Shaughnessy uncovered an oval mound of burnt and blackened material measuring roughly 15 metres by 13 metres and rising to about half a metre at its highest point. At its centre lay the trough itself, rectangular and steep-sided, its base lined with four oak planks and its walls reinforced with a combination of wider planks and thin narrow timbers, the whole assembly held firm by stakes and stone slabs. Closely spaced stone slabs arranged along the northwest side formed a kind of stepping-stone approach to the trough, suggesting repeated, deliberate use. A clay-based hearth, measuring 1.2 metres square, sat directly opposite one end of the trough, still covered in places by a dense spread of charcoal. A stone pathway nine metres long extended outward from the northwest edge of the mound towards firmer ground, presumably the route people used to move between the site and drier terrain. Two other features of uncertain purpose were also found nearby, including a pit and a rectilinear feature with a narrow drain extending from one end, though neither was fully excavated. No objects were recovered, which is not unusual for sites of this type, but oak samples from the trough timbers were sent for dendrochronological analysis, a method that dates timber by matching its growth rings against established sequences. The result placed the felling of those trees to around 1513 BC, give or take nine years, locating this particular episode of activity firmly in the Middle Bronze Age.