Burnt mounds are among the most commonly encountered prehistoric features in Ireland, typically consisting of fire-shattered stone and charcoal-rich soil deposited beside a water-filled trough. The process is thought to have involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into the trough to boil water, most likely for cooking, though bathing and industrial uses have also been proposed. They tend to be modest in scale and easy to miss, which is partly why they so often come to light only when ground is broken for roads or buildings.

The Farrankelly site was excavated in 2020 by archaeologist Muireann Ní Cheallacháin of IAC Archaeology, during construction works by Cairn Homes. What emerged in the area known as Area 5 were two distinct mounds. The more substantial of the two, Mound A, was accompanied by a second and noticeably smaller feature, Mound B, situated roughly two and a half metres to its northeast. Mound B took a sub-rectangular shape and consisted of a single layer of loose, dark silty sand mixed with burnt stone. Beneath it, in the southwest corner, excavators identified a trough, the kind of feature central to how burnt mounds functioned. The trough held a single fill of similar material to the surrounding deposit, suggesting it had been deliberately backfilled once it fell out of use. Cutting across both the trough and the eastern edge of Mound B was a modern field drain, a reminder of how many centuries of activity can be compressed into a single soil profile, with drainage works from the recent past slicing through features thousands of years older.