The burnt spreads had effectively sealed the features beneath them, preserving their arrangement in the ground long after the people who made them had disappeared.

The features, consisting of two troughs and three pits, were excavated by archaeologist Goorik Dehaene during the N11 road scheme, recorded under excavation licence E3220. Burnt spreads of this kind are commonly associated with fulacht fiadh activity, a Bronze Age practice involving the heating of stones in fire and then plunging them into water-filled troughs to boil or heat the water, though the precise function of such sites remains a subject of debate among archaeologists. The stones crack and shatter with repeated heating and cooling, leaving behind the characteristic mounds of blackened, fire-shattered stone that survive so frequently in the Irish landscape. Here at Ballynapark, the burnt material had accumulated over the troughs themselves, suggesting repeated use and eventual abandonment of the site during the Bronze Age period.