It was not built to be hidden; it simply got buried, as most of its kind do, under centuries of accumulating soil and forgetting.

The trough came to light during land reclamation work, when machinery broke through into a rectangular stone-lined pit measuring roughly 1.68 metres by 1.07 metres and about 0.76 metres deep. The construction was precise for all its apparent simplicity: a single vertical slab forming each of the four sides, the corners wedged tight with smaller stones, and one flat slab laid across the floor. Its long axis ran northwest to southeast. Inside, excavators found black earth and fragments of burnt stone, the classic signature of a fulacht fia. These Bronze Age cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically worked by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil; the cracked, heat-shattered stones were then discarded nearby, building up over time into the low horseshoe-shaped mounds that still dot Irish fields. At Caherlusky, those discarded fragments were spread across the surrounding ground surface rather than piled, and the trough itself was deliberately backfilled and left intact below the pasture.

The site is not marked or signposted, and the trough is not visible above ground. The burnt stones scattered across the surrounding area are the only surface evidence that anything of note lies beneath, though even those would be easy to overlook without knowing what to look for.