Before St Joseph's Secondary School was built on the site between 2015 and 2016, the ground was wet, level pasture, the kind of low-lying terrain that Bronze Age communities across Ireland seemed to favour for a particular and still somewhat puzzling activity: the repeated heating of stones, their cracking under thermal stress, and their disposal in low, spreading mounds.

The mound at Tulla was first identified by archaeologist Aidan O'Connell through geophysical survey and targeted testing in 2014. When excavated, it measured roughly 6 metres by 5 metres and was no more than 0.4 metres deep at its thickest, a shallow spread of heat-shattered stone packed into a matrix of carbonised silty clay. A sample of ash charcoal from the deposit was radiocarbon dated to between 2470 and 2210 cal. BC, placing the site firmly in the Early Bronze Age. No pits, troughs, or artefacts were found alongside the mound material, which makes interpretation more difficult. Burnt mounds of this type, sometimes called fulachtaí fia, are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, yet their precise function remains debated; cooking, bathing, industrial processing, and textile preparation have all been proposed. What the Tulla site adds to this picture is scale and clustering: a second burnt mound was excavated approximately 75 metres to the north-east under the same licence, and a fulacht fia, a term often used specifically for examples with associated water troughs, was uncovered around 100 metres away during the school groundworks in 2015. Three sites of the same broad type, within a short radius, on ground that would have been reliably wet and accessible to water, suggests this corner of Clare was a place people returned to, over and over, for reasons that the stones themselves no longer reveal.