They came to light in July 2018 during routine archaeological monitoring of trenches being dug ahead of tree-planting, the kind of watching brief that occasionally turns up something worth stopping for.

What the monitoring revealed were two discrete spreads of burnt stone sitting close together in the soil. The larger measured roughly 2.4 metres north to south and 1 metre across, lying only about 15 centimetres below ground. A little to the north, at a greater depth of around 70 centimetres, a smaller spread measuring approximately 1.15 by 0.5 metres was also identified. Burnt stone features of this kind are frequently associated with fulachta fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The term is sometimes loosely translated as "cooking place of the deer," though their exact function has been debated by archaeologists for decades. The Cornageeha finds have not been definitively interpreted, but the form is consistent with that tradition. Crucially, both spreads are thought to extend further than what was actually uncovered, suggesting the visible evidence is only a portion of something larger still underground. The area has since been excluded from tree-planting, preserving whatever lies beneath.