Road-building projects have a way of uncovering what centuries of ploughing and pasture quietly conceal, and the Kildare Bypass, cut through the townland of Tully in 2002, proved no exception. During routine monitoring of topsoil-stripping along the route, archaeologists identified a scatter of pits, post-holes, and stake-holes stretching across roughly 70 metres of ground, the kind of low-visibility evidence that would leave no trace above the surface and that only the mechanical exposure of subsoil brings to light.

The excavation, carried out by Ó Maoldúin under licence in 2002, revealed two distinct areas of prehistoric activity within the scatter. On the eastern side, a cluster of stake- and post-holes, the kind of structural evidence left by timber uprights driven into the ground for walls or fencing, yielded a particularly notable find: a single, well-preserved sherd of prehistoric pottery carrying incised decoration. Close by sat what appeared to be a hearth, made up of two shallow, bowl-shaped pits connected to one another, their edges showing signs of burning in place. Three flint flakes turned up nearby, further suggesting human activity over a sustained period. Some 30 metres to the west, an isolated pit contained five sherds of poorly preserved pottery, similar enough in character to the eastern finds to suggest the two areas were part of the same broader occupation. A third focus, to the west and south, comprised four pits filled with charcoal-rich soil and fire-cracked quartz stone. This combination is the hallmark of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, in which stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. The cracked and shattered stones, discarded after use, are their most recognisable signature.

What emerges from Tully is not a dramatic monument but a quiet accumulation of evidence for everyday prehistoric life, cooking, shelter, and the small debris of domestic routine, preserved by accident beneath a Kildare field until a bypass happened to pass through it.