This is a fulacht fia, a type of burnt mound found across Ireland and Britain, generally interpreted as a prehistoric cooking site where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The one at Laughanstown is not visible to any passer-by, having been deliberately covered over and preserved in place after its discovery, which is itself a quietly interesting fate for a monument that probably dates back thousands of years.

The site came to light in 2003 during archaeological monitoring of topsoil stripping, carried out under licence number 03E1370. At that point, the ground had already been through one significant transformation: Ordnance Survey maps from the nineteenth century show this south-west-facing slope as marshy ground, and the land was reclaimed sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. What the reclamation work preserved, ironically, was a burnt mound measuring roughly 54 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 17 metres across, surviving to a height of between 0.1 and 0.3 metres. The material was loosely compacted black-brown sandy clay, dense with charcoal and the heat-cracked stones that give fulachtaí fia their characteristic appearance. A second burnt mound was subsequently identified approximately 95 metres to the south-east, a detail communicated by archaeologist Melanie McQuade in November 2014, suggesting this corner of Laughanstown saw repeated or extended prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated event.

Because the monument was covered over and preserved in situ, there is nothing to see at ground level today. Its location in what is now suburban south County Dublin, close to the Cherrywood development area, means the landscape around it has changed considerably. The significance of the site lies less in what a visitor can observe and more in what it represents about the deep archaeology of ground that was dismissed as mere marshland for much of recent history, and then built over without anyone initially suspecting what lay beneath the soil.