At Scartbarry in County Cork, the construction of the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass did both. Before the road-builders moved in, a fulacht fia, one of the crescent-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone that are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, was revealed in the soil south of a watercourse. Part of it had already been clipped by machinery before the excavation began in 2004 and 2005, but enough survived to make the site worth careful attention.

What emerged beneath the mound, which measured roughly nine metres by eight metres and sat only about thirty centimetres proud of the surrounding ground, was a rectangular timber-lined trough, just over two metres long and less than half a metre deep. Fulachtaí fia, as these sites are understood today, were essentially outdoor cooking or heating installations: stones were fired in a hearth, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. The accumulated debris of shattered, thermally-stressed stones was raked aside after each use, gradually building up the characteristic mound. At Scartbarry, some of the trough timbers showed signs of burning, and the base and corners of the trough were studded with stake-holes, twenty-four in total across the base and corners, suggesting some kind of internal framework or repair history. A possible pit lay about sixty centimetres to the south-west of the trough, and what appears to have been a dried-up or deliberately backfilled watercourse was recorded immediately to the north of the mound, consistent with the practical need to site such installations close to a reliable water supply. Radiocarbon dating placed the activity firmly in the late Bronze Age, with calibrated dates ranging from approximately 811 to 419 BC, meaning people were using this spot somewhere between two and a half and three thousand years ago.