Before construction could proceed, strip-trenching exposed a spread of heat-shattered stone and charcoal-darkened soil measuring 23 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south, 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 the boil, accumulating a mound of cracked, spent stone with each use. What the Muckridge example offered was unusual detail about how such a site was actually organised and maintained.

Excavation revealed two substantial troughs and five smaller pits, any of which may have served as additional troughs or for storing materials. Trough 1 was rectangular, measuring roughly 3.3 metres by 2.1 metres and just over a metre deep, with timber remains in its backfill that may be the remnants of a wooden lining, a feature known from other fulacht fia sites and presumably intended to prevent the trough walls from collapsing. A curving arc of stake-holes around it was interpreted as a windbreak, a practical touch suggesting the site was in regular use and its users attentive to the conditions. Trough 2 was bowl-shaped and slightly shallower, at around 0.7 metres deep. The large number of stake-holes associated with both troughs hints at structures, however light, built to service the work. A radiocarbon date taken from one of the smaller pits returned a calibrated date of between 2620 and 2280 BC, placing activity here firmly in the earlier Bronze Age, when fulacht fia use across Ireland was at or near its peak.