When preliminary testing ahead of the M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy motorway was carried out in November 2016, archaeologist Y. Whitty identified features at Ballycarrigeen Lower that proved significant enough to warrant full excavation the following April. What emerged was a fulacht fia, the most common type of prehistoric monument in Ireland, typically consisting of a spread of fire-cracked stones discarded after repeated heating and quenching in water. The example here sat on a slight north-facing slope, and its mound of broken and burnt stone measured thirteen metres by nine metres and up to 0.6 metres deep.

Beneath that mound lay the working heart of the site: a rectangular trough, roughly 2.6 metres long, 1.72 metres wide, and 0.27 metres deep, with straight sides and a flat bottom. It had been filled over time with seven distinct layers of silty, sandy clay or marl mixed with burnt stones, the accumulated residue of a process in which stones were heated in fire and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to cooking temperature. To the west of the trough was a large pit filled with charcoal-flecked sandy silt, and a short channel running beneath the eastern edge of the mound would have helped manage water flow to the working area. Two smaller pits cut through the mound's north-western edge also contained burnt stone. The only portable finds were a handful of possible struck flints, but a fragment of willow charcoal from the mound gave a radiocarbon date of 1106 to 906 cal. BC, placing the site firmly in the middle Bronze Age. Local knowledge added one further detail: a stone-lined well, which had stood at the wettest point of the field where two old drainage channels converged, had been removed by the landowner at some point before excavation. Its position, directly where water naturally collected, almost certainly reflects the same logic that drew Bronze Age people to this spot in the first place.