What the cutting exposed was a fulacht fia, the term used for a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found throughout Ireland, typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone and charred debris left behind after repeated heating and quenching of water in a trough. The drain section revealed burnt material running sixteen metres north to south and half a metre deep, while local knowledge suggested a further spread of roughly twelve metres to the east, though that portion was subsequently buried under the soil lifted out of the drain itself.

The site sits within a cluster of four such monuments recorded in this part of north Cork. A researcher named Bowman noted all four in 1934, documenting them as lying on land belonging to a Mr O'Flynn. Fulachta fiadh, the plural form, tend to congregate in low-lying and waterlogged ground precisely because ready access to water was central to however they were used, and the marshy setting at Lackaneen fits that pattern exactly. The 1986 drainage work gave archaeologists an unplanned cross-section through the deposit, the kind of accidental exposure that often produces some of the most useful stratigraphic information about sites that were never formally excavated.