What makes these features consistently strange is the simplicity of the technology involved: water-filled troughs, heated stones, and the accumulation of cracked and burnt rock that marks where people gathered, possibly for centuries, to boil large quantities of food or liquid. The burnt mound at Richmond sat quietly beneath the soil, preserving its layout in some detail.

The excavation, directed by Donald Murphy, exposed a burnt spread of roughly seven metres by six metres and nearly half a metre thick, a substantial deposit of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-stained earth that had built up over repeated use. Beneath it, sealed and protected by the accumulated debris above, was an oval trough measuring approximately three metres by 1.8 metres, the kind of timber-lined or rock-cut basin into which heated stones would have been dropped to raise the water temperature. Four associated pits were also identified. The method was effective enough that experimental archaeology has demonstrated it can bring water to a rolling boil within minutes, and maintain that heat long enough to cook a considerable joint of meat. What was being prepared at Richmond, and by whom, remains unknown, though fulachta fiadh are broadly associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC.