That is precisely how this burnt mound came to light at all: in December 2016, when heather-grown pasture in Lismoran was converted to forestry, archaeological monitoring of the ground works exposed the deposit in section across two parallel trenches. Without that intervention, it would almost certainly have remained undetected.

Burnt mounds are among the more quietly mysterious features of the Irish landscape. They are typically prehistoric accumulations of stone that was heated in fire and then plunged into water, perhaps repeatedly, as a means of cooking or bathing or processing materials; the thermal shock shatters the stone into small fragments, and over time these build up into a distinctive spread of cracked rock and dark, organic soil. The Lismoran example sits on damp, level ground near the south-western end of a raised spine of bedrock, with the ground dropping away sharply to the south-east. The exposed layer runs five to six metres along a north-east to south-west axis and reaches roughly half a metre in depth. Its full extent remains unknown because its outline cannot be traced at the surface. What makes the location particularly striking is that it does not stand alone: a second burnt mound lies twenty metres to the north-west, and a third sits forty metres to the north-north-west. Three such features clustered within a short distance of one another suggests this damp, unremarkable-looking slope was a place of repeated and deliberate activity, at some point well before the historical record begins.