In November 2016, monitoring of topsoil removal ahead of construction work for the M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy motorway brought to light a cluster of Bronze Age features on the south bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Monroe, at the bottom of a gently sloping field in Co. Wexford. What emerged was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological record. A fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up beside a trough, usually near water. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, though for what purpose, cooking, textile processing, bathing, something else entirely, remains a matter of genuine debate.

The Riverview site, formally excavated as Riverview 2, produced two small spreads of burnt mound material and a possible hearth, all sealed beneath two layers of silt. About five metres to the south-west of the larger spread, excavators uncovered an oval trough, roughly 1.6 metres by 0.83 metres and 0.6 metres deep, with a flat base sealed with clay and traces of a wood lining in alder. Radiocarbon dating of that alder placed the trough's first use somewhere between 1195 and 978 cal. BC, placing it firmly in the middle Bronze Age. The trough was not used once and abandoned. After a period of silting and slumping, it was re-cut to slightly different dimensions and backfilled with dark grey burnt mound material. Charcoal from ash wood recovered from this second phase dated to between 797 and 543 cal. BC, suggesting the site was revisited and put back into use several centuries after its first abandonment. Ash was the dominant fuel throughout, followed by oak and alder. Only five pieces of flint were recovered from the entire site, and just one showed signs of having been worked, a reminder of how little personal material people left behind at these places.