It came to light only because the road beside it was being improved, and the ground had to be tested before the diggers moved in.

What the archaeologists found was a fulacht fia, a type of site found across Ireland in large numbers, typically consisting of a mound of shattered, fire-cracked stone beside a pit or trough. The general interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, though what exactly was being cooked, or whether the troughs served other purposes such as bathing or textile processing, remains a matter of debate. At Drumgeeny, the remains were modest but telling: several spreads of broken and burnt stone, ranging in size from less than a metre across to around three and a half metres, lay over an oval pit roughly 1.9 metres long and up to 0.7 metres deep, filled with burnt and broken stone. Cutting through that oval pit was a second, rectangular pit, approximately 2 metres by 1.15 metres, filled with a silty clay containing charcoal flecks. A plank recovered from the fill of the rectangular pit suggests it had originally been timber-lined, forming the trough into which heated stones would have been dropped. A sample of oak charcoal from the same fill was radiocarbon dated to 3372 plus or minus 30 BP, calibrated to between 1746 and 1538 BC, placing the site firmly in the Middle Bronze Age. The low-lying position among the drumlins, the rounded hills of glacial till that give this part of Monaghan its rolling character, would have made it a naturally damp and water-accessible spot, exactly the kind of location where fulacht fia sites tend to cluster.