What brought it to light was the mechanical removal of a modern farm track, and what it contained, once excavated, was a precisely layered record of sustained burning from well over a thousand years ago.

The pit at Killoran sits at the base of a west-facing slope on the margin of a small bog, a setting that would have been familiar to people moving through this landscape in the early medieval period. Inside, excavators found several distinct layers: decayed sandstone, fire-cracked sandstone, and charcoal-rich sandy clays, all sealed beneath a final capping of charcoal and silty clay loam. Charcoal recovered from the pit was radiocarbon dated to between AD 660 and 880, placing its use firmly in the early medieval period, a time when Ireland was a patchwork of small kingdoms, busy monastic settlements, and working farmsteads. The feature is classified as a burnt pit, a type of deposit associated with fulachta fiadh, the burnt mound sites found widely across Ireland and Britain. These typically involved heating stones in fire and using them to boil water, though their exact function remains debated. The fire-cracked sandstone here fits that pattern well, since repeated heating and sudden cooling causes stone to fracture in a distinctive way. Whether this particular pit served a cooking, bathing, or craft-related purpose is not recorded.