It is not dramatic to look at, and by the time most people pass this way on the N8 between Cashel and Mitchelstown, the ground above it has long since been disturbed by road works. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely its ordinariness: a small, dark patch in the earth that someone, thousands of years ago, heated stones over, and then left behind.

The site came to light in May 2006 during Phase II test excavation of the N8 Cashel to Mitchelstown road improvement scheme. It was excavated over two days, 18 and 19 August 2006, by archaeologist Bernice Molloy, and recorded as Site No. 1253 in the Excavations bulletin for that year. What she found was a single spread of silty clay containing moderate amounts of charcoal and burnt stone, sitting at the base of a gradual south-facing slope close to the river. Overlying it was a thin peat deposit, between 0.1 and 0.12 metres deep, which had effectively sealed the material beneath. The deposit is considered likely prehistoric in date. Features like this are sometimes associated with fulacht fiadh, the Irish term for burnt mound sites, where stones were heated in fire and dropped into water-filled troughs, possibly for cooking, bathing, or craft processes. Whether that interpretation applies here was not confirmed, but the riverbank location fits the pattern well enough to suggest it.

There is nothing to visit at this location in any conventional sense. The excavation was carried out ahead of road construction, which means the ground has since been built over or significantly altered. The value of the site lies in what it represents within the archaeological record rather than in any accessible feature on the landscape. For those interested in how prehistoric activity is traced and documented in Ireland, the Excavations.ie database entry, reference E4595, gives the full site record. The River Funshion itself still runs through this part of Limerick, and the gradual slopes and low-lying ground along its banks remain much as they would have been when someone first lit a fire here.