During construction work on a forestry road, a layer of burnt material roughly four metres long and half a metre thick was exposed in the bank, along with heat-shattered stones where the stream crosses the road. Left undisturbed, it might have stayed buried indefinitely beneath the undulating pasture of Gullaba.

What this deposit represents is almost certainly a fulacht fiadh, or burnt mound, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil; the cracked and blackened stones were then discarded into a mound nearby. The characteristic dark, charcoal-rich material and the heat-shattered stones at Gullaba fit this pattern closely. The site does not sit in isolation. Approximately forty metres to the south-west lie the remains of enclosures and a hut site, and roughly the same distance to the south-east stands a standing stone. That cluster of features, each likely dating to the Bronze Age, suggests this stretch of the valley floor was a place of sustained human activity rather than passing use.

The surrounding area has been planted with commercial forestry since the site was recorded, which both obscures the broader landscape and, in an ironic way, helps preserve what lies beneath the ground from further disturbance. The burnt spread itself was exposed at the stream bank and the forest road crossing, meaning the visible evidence is modest and easy to overlook, a dark stain in a cut bank rather than anything that announces itself from a distance.