It would almost certainly have remained unknown had engineers not needed to drive a bridge abutment into the ground for the Callan bypass. What emerged was a fulacht fia, a type of ancient outdoor cooking monument found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a water-filled trough and a surrounding mound of fire-cracked stone left over from repeated heating and quenching. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire until they were intensely hot, then dropping them into a trough of water to bring it to a boil. It is a technique that leaves a very particular archaeological signature, and this site carried it clearly.

Archaeological monitoring in advance of the construction work led to excavation by John Channing in April 1995. Once the topsoil was stripped, a roughly circular spread of burnt and fractured stone mixed with charcoal became visible, between ten and fourteen metres across, with a noticeably denser concentration at its centre. Beneath this lay an oval trough, measuring roughly 2.6 metres north to south, 1.85 metres east to west, and half a metre deep. To the south and south-east of the trough, excavators found three distinct areas of intense burning, along with a scatter of smaller pits and shallow depressions. Channing observed that in wetter conditions the trough would have filled naturally with groundwater, which makes sense given the site's proximity to the Kings River just ten metres to the south. No artefacts were recovered from the monument, which is not unusual for this type of site; the material record of a fulacht fia is almost entirely the fire-cracked stone itself and the negative evidence of the trough cut into the ground.