During archaeological test-trenching carried out ahead of construction, excavators came across something that had lain undisturbed in the soil since prehistoric times: a scatter of heat-shattered stones mixed through charcoal-enriched earth, sitting quietly in shallow hollows in the old ground surface.

Excavation in 2001 uncovered an irregularly shaped deposit measuring roughly ten metres by five metres, surviving to a maximum depth of around forty centimetres. This is the characteristic signature of a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found widely across Ireland and Britain, typically interpreted as the remains of ancient cooking or heating activity. The usual picture involves stones being heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, with the cracked and spent stones gradually accumulating into a mound nearby. At Ballinaspig More, however, no trough, pit, or other associated features were found, which is why the site is classified as a possible burnt mound rather than a confirmed one. The deposit appears to have survived only because the natural depressions in the prehistoric ground surface offered some protection; elsewhere, the evidence had evidently not lasted.