Burnt mounds, known in Irish as fulacht fiadh, are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, low horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone and charcoal thought to relate to cooking or industrial processes stretching back thousands of years. Finding one during a road scheme would have been unremarkable. What the excavation actually produced was something considerably more deflating.

The feature, an irregular pit roughly 2.2 metres wide and just 0.1 metres deep, contained dark grey clay silt mixed with flecks of charcoal and small burnt stones, superficially consistent with the kind of heat-affected deposits that archaeologists associate with ancient activity. But closer inspection told a different story. Excavator N. O'Flanagan concluded in a 2003 report that the subsoil had simply been subjected to high temperatures at a relatively recent date, most likely as the result of a hedge fire burning above it. The ground had cooked from above, not from sustained prehistoric use. A second, similar feature was identified close by, suggesting the same episode of burning had affected a wider area. In both cases, the earth remembered a fire that history would not.