At Cahircalla More on the outskirts of Ennis, test trenching carried out in 2003 ahead of the Ennis Bypass and Western Relief Road broke into a peat bog edge and uncovered evidence of repeated prehistoric activity that had been quietly preserved in the waterlogged ground for roughly four thousand years. When full excavation followed in 2004, archaeologists identified seven separate burnt mounds clustered in the same general area, each one a distinct deposit of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-rich soil.

Burnt mounds are one of the more common prehistoric site types in Ireland, yet their precise function remains genuinely debated. The working explanation is that they served as cooking or processing sites, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil, the shattered, heat-fractured stones accumulating into a characteristic mound over time. The particular area recorded here, designated Area vii in the excavation sequence, consisted of a burnt spread measuring seven metres by five metres and no more than ten to twenty centimetres thick, sandwiched between layers of peat. A radiocarbon date obtained from the deposit places its use somewhere between 2290 and 2040 Cal BC, situating it in the Early Bronze Age, a period when communities across Ireland were leaving exactly this kind of fragmentary, functional trace in boggy ground at the edges of their landscapes. The excavation findings were subsequently published by Taylor in 2006 and revisited by Bermingham, Hull and Taylor in 2012.