It shows up on aerial photographs as a dark stain against the soil, the kind of anomaly that aerial archaeology has made newly legible across the Irish countryside. This is a burnt mound, a class of prehistoric monument found in considerable numbers throughout Ireland and Britain, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The basic idea was simple: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. Repeated heating and sudden cooling left the stones shattered and blackened, and over time the discarded material accumulated into the low, spreading mounds that survive today.

This particular example sits on a gentle east and north-east facing slope, positioned close to the headwaters of streams that flow roughly 650 metres to the north-east before joining the River Corock, a modest watercourse running broadly north-west to south-east some 140 to 180 metres away. The proximity to water is characteristic; burnt mounds almost invariably appear near reliable sources of it, since water was the whole point of the process. What the water was being heated for remains a matter of ongoing discussion among archaeologists, with cooking, bathing, hide-working, and textile production all proposed at various sites. The mound here measures approximately 18 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 16 metres across, and its south-eastern edge has been cut through by a field bank. A second burnt mound lies roughly 230 metres to the north, suggesting that this stretch of County Wexford saw repeated use over time, or perhaps contemporaneous activity at closely related spots.