But when the spoil was examined in the mid-1980s, a thin dark layer of charcoal and fire-cracked stone told a familiar story from an unfamiliar angle: here was a fulacht fiadh, a type of Bronze Age cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a mound of burnt and shattered stone left behind after repeated episodes of heating water in a trough.

The site sits at the landward end of a low, peat-covered rise that juts out into Portmagee Channel, the narrow strait separating Valentia from the Iveragh Peninsula to the south. The burnt material, a lens just fifteen centimetres thick, lay beneath roughly forty centimetres of accumulated peat. Charcoal recovered from the deposit included oak, hawthorn, and poplar or willow, a mix that reflects the kinds of scrubby, waterside woodland that would have bordered this low-lying ground in the Bronze Age. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal returned a result of 3800 plus or minus 100 years before present, placing activity here somewhere around the mid-second millennium BC, broadly in keeping with the wider pattern of fulacht fiadh use across Ireland.