It took careful archaeological monitoring of the topsoil-stripping to catch it at all. Once excavated, the feature revealed itself as a small oval pit, measuring roughly 0.86 metres by 1.08 metres, with gently sloping sides, a flat base, and a depth of just 0.22 metres, cut directly into natural subsoil. Its fill was a greyish-black sandy clay packed with fragments of burnt granite and sandstone. In itself, the pit was unremarkable in scale. What made it significant was what it pointed to.

The feature belongs to a class of site known as a fulacht fia, the most common form of prehistoric monument found in Ireland. The term refers to a cooking or heating site, typically Bronze Age in date, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Over time the repeatedly fractured stones accumulated into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened, burnt material. The Killoughter pit, excavated under licence during work on the Hollybrook to Wicklow Bord Gáis Éireann pipeline, appeared to be only an outlying fragment of something larger. The landowner confirmed that several further spreads of burnt material lay in the field immediately to the west, which was under pasture at the time of construction. No additional archaeological features were recorded in the immediate area of the excavated pit itself, but the picture those conversations with the landowner assembled was of a more substantial fulacht fiadh partially hidden beneath ordinary farmland, with only this small peripheral element caught by the pipeline corridor and brought to light.