At Cahircalla More on the outskirts of Ennis, a routine programme of test trenching carried out in 2003 ahead of the Ennis Bypass and Western Relief Road turned up something far older than any modern infrastructure: a cluster of burnt mounds sitting at the edge of a peat bog, close enough to the surface that they might easily have been destroyed without anyone noticing.

When the site was properly excavated in 2004, archaeologists uncovered not one but seven discrete prehistoric burnt mounds. Burnt mounds are among the most common yet least glamorous monuments in the Irish archaeological record, typically consisting of a spread of fire-cracked stones, charcoal, and ash, usually found near water or boggy ground. The leading theory is that they served as cooking or heating sites, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil. The particular area recorded here, sandwiched between layers of peat, measured roughly 9.3 metres by 7.3 metres and was only about 0.1 metres thick, a modest deposit but one that proved surprisingly informative. Radiocarbon dating placed its use somewhere between 1910 and 1700 Cal BC, placing it firmly in the Early Bronze Age, a period when communities across Ireland were making extensive use of exactly this kind of site for purposes that may have extended beyond cooking into bathing, textile processing, or other communal activities.