During pipeline work in Mayfield, County Waterford, two small patches of fire-cracked stones turned up in the ground, each no more than a metre across. Unremarkable to look at, perhaps, but burnt mounds are among the most quietly persistent features of the Irish landscape, appearing in their thousands from the Bronze Age onward. The general interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, possibly for cooking, bathing, or industrial processes. What remains is the discarded pile of cracked and blackened stone, left exactly where it was thrown.

These two patches were identified during the laying of a Bord Gáis pipeline, the kind of infrastructural groundwork that has, over the decades, revealed a great deal about what lies just below the surface of ordinary Irish fields. The fieldnotes were recorded by M. Gowen, and though the circumstances of discovery were routine, the find itself points to activity on this patch of Waterford ground stretching back potentially thousands of years. The modest diameter of the deposits, between half a metre and one metre, suggests either limited use or that only a fragment of a larger spread was exposed by the pipe trench.