It left behind two small bowl-shaped pits pressed close together in the earth, one circular and packed with charcoal, the other oval and stained through with burnt red and brown clay. The natural clay around them had been fired red as well. Together, they were identified as the remains of a hearth, modest in scale but remarkably well-preserved in the record of what they once were.

The pits came to light in 2001 during test-trenching carried out ahead of construction work on the N22 Ballincollig Bypass. Excavation was led by Murphy, and radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples from the site produced calibrated dates ranging from 2920 to 2560 cal. BC and 2520 to 2500 cal. BC, placing the hearth firmly in the Late Neolithic or very early Bronze Age transition. The two pits sat just five centimetres apart. The first measured roughly forty centimetres across and ten centimetres deep; the second was broader and oval, running approximately eighty centimetres north to south and up to five metres east to west at its widest. Whether this was a cooking place, a site of repeated activity, or something more occasional, the evidence does not say. What it does confirm is that someone returned to this spot, or used it in ways that left a sustained thermal impression on the surrounding ground.