They are spreads of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-blackened soil, found in their hundreds across the country, and their precise purpose remains debated, with theories ranging from Bronze Age cooking sites to communal bathing places or industrial processing areas. The example uncovered at Corbally, in Co. Wexford, is not dramatic in scale, but it carries the particular interest of a site revealed almost by accident, its existence unknown until the path of a motorway cut directly through it.

In January 2017, archaeological testing ahead of construction work on the M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy motorway identified features across four areas at a location now designated Corbally 6. Full excavation followed. Area 1 produced four pits of varying sizes, the smallest roughly 1.3 metres by 1.1 metres and only 0.2 metres deep, the largest stretching to 4 metres by 2.7 metres and re-cut on two separate occasions, suggesting repeated use. Their fills, grading from black to yellow silty sands, appear to have accumulated through natural silting rather than deliberate backfilling, and no artefacts were recovered from any of them. Crucially, none of the pits functioned as a trough, the water-filled stone-lined basin that is the classic companion feature to a burnt mound. The mound material itself lay some 10 to 15 metres to the south, a single thin spread measuring roughly 9.5 metres by 4.8 metres and only 6 centimetres deep. Two parallel north-south drainage channels, consistent with a modern field bank recorded on older maps, had cut through the burnt spread, complicating the picture somewhat but also helping to date the boundary as later than the archaeology beneath it.