Before the machinery moved in, a low, irregular mound sat in reclaimed pasture about thirty metres east of a stream, scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding ground. It was, in fact, a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically identified by their characteristic spread of fire-cracked stones and dark, charcoal-rich soil. These monuments are among the most common prehistoric features in the Irish landscape, yet each one, when properly examined, tends to complicate any tidy explanation of what they were actually used for.

Excavation in 1999 revealed an approximately rectangular mound, roughly six metres east to west and four metres north to south, composed of those telltale heat-shattered stones. The principle behind such sites involves heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a method that leaves behind exactly this kind of fractured, discarded material. At this particular site, a possible trough was identified near the north-east corner of the excavated area, though only one side of it survived. The rest had been lost, partly to a modern north-south field drain cutting through the mound, and partly to later land-drainage works that truncated the feature before any formal investigation could take place. The site was not alone in its immediate surroundings: two further fulachtaí fia were recorded approximately forty and thirty metres to the south-west respectively, suggesting that this stretch of low-lying ground near the stream was returned to repeatedly, perhaps across generations, for whatever activity these monuments supported.