That is, in a sense, the whole point. Somewhere beneath a wet meadow at the foot of a north-east facing ridge in County Tipperary lies a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological record. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally interpreted as prehistoric cooking places, where stones were heated in fire and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil. The crescent-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone that typically mark them above ground are a familiar sight in low-lying, boggy ground. At Crehanagh, even that trace is gone.

The site came to light not through any deliberate search but as a consequence of a gas pipeline excavation in 1986. It is a familiar pattern in Irish archaeology: infrastructure work cuts through farmland and reveals, almost incidentally, something that had lain undisturbed for millennia. The excavation, recorded under reference BW/18/5 and documented by Gowen in 1988, confirmed the presence of the fulacht fia in what is described as undulating terrain, in a wet and lush meadow at the base of the ridge. That combination of waterlogged ground and proximity to a slope is entirely typical of the monument type, and probably explains why the site survived at all, buried and preserved rather than ploughed away.