The find belongs to a category known as a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking place found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough or pit filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it, with the discarded burnt and broken stones accumulating over time into a mound nearby. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, though they remain easy to overlook.

At Tirnaneill, set in the low-lying ground between the drumlin hills that define much of County Monaghan's landscape, testing uncovered two spreads of broken and burnt stone, the larger measuring roughly three metres by just over a metre, and a small associated pit about a metre across and thirteen centimetres deep, also filled with the same fire-cracked material. A sample of hazel charcoal recovered from the site was radiocarbon dated to 3073 plus or minus 30 years before present, which calibrates to somewhere between 1415 and 1266 BC, placing the activity firmly in the Middle Bronze Age. The hazel charcoal itself is a detail worth pausing on; hazel was a common fuel and coppice wood in prehistoric Ireland, and its presence here fits a broader pattern seen at comparable sites across the island.