At Leggatinty in County Roscommon, groundworks for the N5 Ballaghaderreen to Scramoge road improvement project exposed a shallow, irregularly shaped spread of charcoal-rich soil and heat-shattered red sandstone measuring roughly 15.9 metres long and 10.3 metres wide, sitting no deeper than 26 centimetres below the surface. It lay in marginal pasture beside partially cut-away bogland, the kind of unremarkable edge-land that rarely draws attention. The charred wood within it told a different story: the remains of ash, oak, hazel, holly, and blackthorn or cherry, a modest but specific inventory of whatever was burned here, at some point, by someone.

Beneath the spread, excavators found a small, unlined subcircular trough, roughly a metre across, of a type broadly associated with fulacht fiadh activity, the term used for prehistoric burnt mound sites that are among the most commonly found monument types in Irish archaeology. The working theory behind such features is that stones were heated in fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, though what exactly these sites were used for, cooking, bathing, textile processing, or something else entirely, remains a matter of debate. A radiocarbon date from alder charcoal taken from the trough's fill placed its use in the Late Bronze Age, somewhere between 1221 and 1016 cal. BC. Nearby, a small vertical stakehole, just 10 centimetres in diameter, was found a short distance to the north-west of the trough; the excavators suggested it may have marked the trough's location or supported some kind of associated structure. No artefacts of any kind were recovered.

What makes the Leggatinty find particularly open-ended is that the burnt spread continued northward beyond the boundary of the road-take, with an estimated further 10 to 15 metres unexcavated. Its full extent was never established, and the surviving remains were left in place outside the excavation limits. The site, in other words, is still largely there, under the pasture, its edges unknown.