It sits undisturbed, sealed under a terram membrane and 300 millimetres of sand, waiting out the decades beneath whatever match happens to be played above it.

The site came to light in May 2014 during pre-development testing ahead of the pitch's construction. At a depth of between 0.3 and 0.4 metres below the surface, archaeologists uncovered four irregular patches of blackened soil, heat-shattered stone, and occasional charcoal spread across an area of 6.3 metres. This is the characteristic signature of a burnt mound, known in Irish archaeology as a fulacht fia, a type of site associated with Bronze Age cooking or food preparation. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point; the cracked and fire-blackened stones were then discarded in a mound nearby. The Rinnaseer example sat near the base of a south-east facing slope, beside a natural basin of peat overlying marl, exactly the kind of low-lying, waterlogged ground where such sites are most commonly found. It appeared to have been levelled or disturbed at some point before its discovery. The excavation, carried out under licence 14E0144, did not fully investigate the deposit; instead, the decision was taken to preserve it in place. A second fulacht fia lies just 50 metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of Mayo saw repeated use over a long period.

The football pitch above gives no indication of what lies below. There is a certain quiet strangeness to that arrangement, a Bronze Age hearth site going about its geological business of slow preservation while a modern game proceeds on the surface.