Human bones came to light first, pointing to a cemetery nearby. Then, twelve metres from its apparent edge, came something harder to categorise: a broad, saucer-shaped hollow of burnt clay, stones, and charcoal, lying at roughly the same depth as the burials.

A representative of the National Museum of Ireland attended the site and documented what was visible before road works continued. The deposit measured approximately four metres across at its exposed face, with its base sitting sixty centimetres below the road surface. Inside, the material was layered: burnt stones alternating with patches of charcoal and seams of ash, the kind of stratigraphy that accumulates gradually rather than in a single event. The inspector noted it was apparently either a hearth or an ash pit, which is a notably careful distinction. A hearth is a place of repeated burning, often domestic or ritual; an ash pit is where the debris of burning is collected and disposed of. The two functions leave similar physical traces, and without artefacts to help interpret the context, the question remains open. No objects of any kind were recovered from the deposit.

What makes the site quietly arresting is precisely that ambiguity, combined with its proximity to human remains. Burnt spreads of this type, sometimes called fulachta or hearth deposits depending on their context and date, appear throughout Ireland in association with a wide range of activities, from cooking to metalworking to funerary ritual. Whether the burning at Lisnalurg had any relationship to the adjacent cemetery, or whether the two features simply accumulated in the same patch of ground across different periods, cannot be said on present evidence.