Yet when topsoil was being stripped along the route of the N20/N21 Adare to Annacotty road scheme, archaeologists paused the machinery long enough to document something that had lain undisturbed in a patch of poorly drained Limerick pasture for thousands of years. The site never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping, which means it existed entirely outside the official record until the diggers arrived.

A fulacht fia, to use the more common anglicised spelling, is a prehistoric cooking site, the term referring broadly to a mound of burnt and shattered stone left behind after repeated cycles of heating rocks in fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the liquid to a boil. They are among the most frequently encountered prehistoric monuments in Ireland, though their precise function is still debated, with proposals ranging from cooking and brewing to hide-working and bathing. Archaeologist Mary Deevy excavated this particular example, known as Site A, in 1999, and found it to be one of a matching pair. Site B lay on the opposite bank of what had once been a river channel running east to west, possibly a tributary of the River Maigue. The channel is now dry. Site A itself measured roughly 7.5 metres in diameter and survived to a depth of just 0.15 metres, a shallow disc of burnt material sitting on ground that had clearly been waterlogged and active for a long time. Beneath the spread, excavators uncovered what may have been a trough cut into the ground, but the northern edge had been badly truncated, most likely by the rising and falling of the river alongside it, making it impossible to confirm its original function with certainty. No artefacts and no animal bone were recovered.

The site sits on the southern side of the former channel, 37 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballyloughnaan and 70 metres north of a stream that marks the boundary with Monearla. Because it was identified and recorded during road construction monitoring rather than through a designated heritage survey, there is no visitor infrastructure here and the ground remains agricultural land in poorly drained pasture. Anyone with a serious interest in the excavation itself would be better served by consulting Mary Deevy's 2001 report directly, which includes a location map showing the relationship between Site A, Site B, and the dried river channel that once separated them.