The initial assumption, reported in the Irish Times in April of that year, was that it was a wooden trackway, the kind of structure occasionally found preserved in Irish wetlands. It was not.

When archaeologists inspected the site in May 2014, they found four parallel squared timbers aligned northeast to southwest, packed with peat between them and overlain at either end by further peat deposits. Excavation in August of that year, carried out under licence 14E0343, revealed something more specific and considerably older. The timbers appear to form the floor of a rectangular wooden trough, roughly 1.5 metres by 1 metre, originally encircled by seventeen wooden stakes that likely supported wattle walls or timber side-panels. The working hypothesis is that this is a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking site commonly found across Ireland, in which water was boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough and used to cook meat. A radiocarbon date obtained from one of the floor timbers places their felling somewhere between 1750 and 1700 BC, situating the structure firmly in the Early Bronze Age. What makes this example unusual is its location: most fulachta fiadh are found inland, in boggy ground. Finding one in an intertidal zone, now periodically submerged by the sea, points to a dramatically changed landscape, one where the shoreline and even sea level itself have shifted substantially over the intervening three and a half millennia. The timbers were lifted from the beach and are now held by the National Monuments Service in a controlled wet environment to prevent them drying out and deteriorating.