Walking across the low-lying ground on its gentle east-facing slope, you would see nothing out of the ordinary, no rise, no hollow, no visible feature of any kind. The mound here is entirely invisible at ground level, buried just beneath the sod, and it would almost certainly have remained unknown were it not for drainage work carried out for forest development.

What the drains revealed was a spread of charcoal-rich black soil packed with burnt and fire-cracked stone, roughly twenty metres from north to south, fourteen metres east to west, and only about a quarter of a metre deep. This is a burnt mound, a type of site found widely across Ireland and Britain and associated broadly with the Bronze Age, though their precise function has long been debated. The prevailing interpretation is that they represent the debris from a cooking method in which stones were repeatedly heated in a fire and then plunged into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the repeated thermal shock gradually shattering the stones and leaving them useless, to be discarded in the distinctive crescent or kidney-shaped heaps that characterise the sites. Some archaeologists have suggested alternative uses, including sweat-house bathing or the processing of animal hides, and many sites may have served more than one purpose across their use-life. The Powerswood example came to attention through a personal communication from archaeologist Melanie McQuade in December 2016, recorded just days after the drainage work first exposed the material.