A stretch of the River Suir's floodplain in Coolnamuck Demesne, County Waterford, conceals what was almost certainly a prehistoric cooking site, brought to light not by any planned excavation but by the routine work of laying a gas pipeline. What the contractors encountered was a spread of charcoal measuring roughly fifteen metres by three metres and half a metre deep, accompanied by a small quantity of heat-shattered stone. That combination, charcoal and cracked rock, is the defining signature of a burnt mound, a type of site found widely across Ireland and Britain and generally interpreted as evidence of repeated, prolonged heating of stones in fire, then plunging them into water to boil it, leaving behind a crescentic or oval mound of discarded, fractured debris.

The site sits on the floodplain approximately two hundred and ninety metres south of the west-to-east course of the River Suir, and about a hundred and ten metres south of St Anthony's Well. Proximity to water is no coincidence: burnt mounds are almost invariably found near streams, rivers, or marshy ground, since the entire process depends on a ready water supply. The discovery was recorded in fieldnotes by M. Gowan during pipeline monitoring, a reminder of how much Irish archaeology surfaces not through academic research programmes but through the watching briefs that accompany infrastructure projects. Without that pipeline cutting through the floodplain, this particular patch of charcoal and shattered stone might have remained undisturbed and unknown indefinitely.