A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone accumulated over repeated use. This one, however, offers nothing to see at ground level, having been levelled entirely, its presence known only because of what happened to cut through the landscape decades ago.

The site came to light during investigations carried out along the route of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline between 1981 and 1982, a project that, almost incidentally, produced a considerable archaeological record of previously unknown sites across the Irish midlands and south. The discovery at Clonagoose was documented by Cleary and colleagues in 1987, confirming what the pipeline work had disturbed: a fulacht fia that had already been reduced to nothing visible, sitting on a south-west-facing slope in what is now ordinary grazing land. A second fulacht fiadh lies roughly 250 metres to the south-west, suggesting this part of Tipperary saw repeated or prolonged prehistoric activity of this kind, even if the physical evidence has largely been absorbed into the agricultural ground around it.