It measures roughly ten metres by eleven, rises to about 0.7 metres at its highest point, and contains a dark layer of fire-cracked stones and charcoal packed into a black soil matrix at least 25 centimetres deep. To pass it without knowing what it was, you might take it for a field clearance heap or a patch of boggy ground. What it actually represents is something far older and, to archaeologists, considerably more interesting.

This is a burnt spread, one of five identified running along the same valley floor at Afaddy. Burnt spreads of this kind are closely associated with what are known as fulachta fiadh, a term for prehistoric cooking or processing sites typically found near water. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, a method that produces exactly the kind of fractured, heat-stressed stone and charcoal residue found here. The proximity of a spring just 16 metres to the east-south-east, along with the stream running through the valley, would have made this location well suited to that purpose. The concentration of five such spreads along a single valley floor is notable; it suggests the area was returned to repeatedly, perhaps over generations, rather than visited only once. The underlying geology of the ridge and the reliable water sources nearby seem to have made this corridor consistently attractive to whoever was working here.