What they exposed was a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found widely across Ireland and Britain, typically understood as the debris left by repeated cycles of heating stones in fire and plunging them into water-filled troughs, possibly for cooking, bathing, or industrial processes. The concentration of cracked, angular fragments in charcoal-rich earth, measuring roughly nine metres along its length and between thirty and thirty-five centimetres deep, is exactly what archaeologists expect from such sites: the discarded pile of stones that shatter when hot rock meets cold water and become useless for reheating.

The mound sits in a natural hollow of damp ground, sheltered to the north-west by a steeply rising slope and backed to the south-east by a raised spine of rock outcrop, beyond which the ground drops away sharply. Its position in wet, low-lying ground is typical of the type, since a reliable water source was essential to the process. An intact portion of the mound survives as a very low, grass-covered rise just to the north-west of the forestry trench, partially overlain by a field wall running north-east to south-west. In the adjoining field beyond that wall, a patch of firm, grass-covered ground roughly five metres by four metres, conspicuously free of the surrounding heather and scrub, marks the western and north-western edge of the deposit. At the north-eastern end of the exposed section, a cluster of large stones and slabs protrudes from the trench face, and further large stones appeared in the upcast soil beside it; these may be the remnants of a stone-lined trough associated with the original activity on the site. What gives the location an additional degree of interest is that it does not stand alone: a second burnt mound lies just fifteen metres to the south-west, and a third approximately forty metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this sheltered hollow in the Ox Mountains foothills was a place people returned to, repeatedly, over time.