At the edge of a peat bog, close to the surface, lay the remains of prehistoric burnt mounds, the kind of feature that tends to slip through the cracks of popular history despite appearing with some regularity across the Irish landscape.

Burnt mounds are exactly what they sound like: accumulations of fire-cracked stone, typically found near water or boggy ground, left behind by people who repeatedly heated rocks and plunged them into water-filled troughs or pits, probably for cooking or some form of processing. The site at Cahircalla More proved unusually rich. Excavation in 2004 uncovered seven discrete spreads of burnt stone in the area. One of these, designated Area ii, was positioned on slightly drier ground than the others and sat directly on natural gravel rather than bog. It measured roughly 8.4 metres by 5.6 metres and was no more than 0.1 to 0.2 metres thick, a shallow but distinct deposit of mostly limestone with some sandstone mixed in, along with a small amount of charcoal. Radiocarbon dating placed the activity here between approximately 1100 and 900 Cal BC, placing it firmly in the later Bronze Age, a period when communities across Ireland were leaving precisely these kinds of traces near water sources and wetland margins.