It is the kind of feature that would pass entirely unnoticed underfoot, and very nearly did. What it represents is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or industrial site found in great numbers across Ireland. The basic principle involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil; over time the stone fractures from the thermal shock, and the debris accumulates into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped or oval mound that survives today. This particular example is unusual in that no trough was identified during excavation, which leaves its precise function open to interpretation.

The site came to light during the construction of Phase II of the Limerick Southern Ring Road, when archaeological investigations along the route revealed a cluster of Bronze Age features in this stretch of low-lying, poorly drained pasture. The fulacht fia itself lay 160 metres north-west of a series of roughly contemporary sites discovered during the same works. Excavation, reported by Taylor in 2010 and compiled for the record by Edmond O'Donovan, revealed an oval mound measuring 3.2 metres east to west and 2.4 metres north to south. The burnt sandstone and charcoal deposits sat beneath just 0.2 metres of topsoil and directly above naturally deposited clay. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the mound produced a result placing activity here in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, with a calibrated date range of approximately 2567 to 2348 BC. That puts people working on this damp ground somewhere around four and a half thousand years ago, at roughly the same period that construction began at Stonehenge.

The site has been fully excavated, meaning nothing visible remains on the surface today. It now lies within or close to the infrastructure corridor of the ring road, on ground that bears little obvious trace of what was found there. For anyone with an interest in the archaeology of the Shannon corridor, the significance lies less in visiting this precise spot and more in understanding the density of prehistoric activity that the road scheme brought to light across this stretch of floodplain, where waterlogged ground conditions preserved evidence that drier soils would long since have destroyed.