When work began on the Greystones Southern Access Route in County Wicklow, excavators came across two spreads of heat-shattered sandstone fragments embedded in a dark, silty clay, the kind of signature that archaeologists have learned to read as the remains of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in origin, built around a trough of water that was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, repeatedly heated and plunged into cold water, fracture over time, and it is precisely these broken, scorched fragments that survive in the ground long after the wooden troughs and organic materials have gone. At Priestsnewtown, two such spreads were identified under Excavation Licence 04E0267 and recorded as sites 1 and 2. Site 1 measured roughly six metres by three metres and was left undisturbed by the construction work. Site 2 was slightly larger at approximately six metres by three and a half metres, though a pipe trench cut through it during the works, incidentally exposing a pit measuring around two metres by just under a metre and a depth of twenty centimetres. Both sites were interpreted as possible fulachta fia by Wiggins in 2007, the cautious phrasing reflecting the fact that without datable organic material or more extensive excavation, the identification, while strongly suggested by the physical evidence, remains provisional.