These sites, sometimes called fulacht fiadh, are thought to represent repeated episodes of heating stones in fire and plunging them into water-filled troughs, a process that fractures the stones and gradually builds up the characteristic mounds of cracked rock and blackened earth that survive to this day. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is less what was found than the circumstances and manner of its discovery.

The site came to light in 2000 during topsoil stripping ahead of the construction of the Ballincollig-to-Ballineen gas pipeline. What the machinery exposed was a large spread of material that had already been considerably disturbed, pulled and dragged across the ground by repeated ploughing over what was presumably many years. A test-trench measuring 1.2 metres wide and 25 metres long was excavated east to west across the deposit, but the survival was thin, barely 0.05 metres deep in places, and the spread resolved itself into just two patches within that length. A separate, more coherent subcircular feature, roughly 1.81 metres in diameter and 0.4 metres deep, was identified to the west of the trench and offered a better sense of what the original deposit might once have looked like. The excavator, working from local information gathered at the time, concluded that the main body of undisturbed material likely lies to the north of the pipeline corridor, beyond the area that was opened up and examined.