What they had found was a fulacht fia, the remains of a prehistoric cooking site of a kind encountered all across Ireland. The typical fulacht fia consists of a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined, into which water was poured, and a fire nearby used to heat stones. The stones were dropped into the water to bring it to a boil, then discarded in a mound once they had cracked and spent their heat. These mounds of dark, shattered stone are what archaeologists call a burnt spread, and they are often the only visible trace of what was once a busy, if temporary, working place.

The Ballycrone site came to light in 2005 during monitoring of topsoil stripping carried out under Excavation Licence 05E0406, in an area designated as area 1. Monitoring of this kind is a standard requirement on development sites in Ireland, where archaeologists observe groundworks as they proceed so that anything significant can be identified before it is disturbed further. In this case, the precaution proved worthwhile. Only part of the burnt spread was excavated; the remainder was preserved in situ, left in the ground outside the footprint of the development. That decision means a portion of the site survives intact beneath the surface, sealed and unexamined, as McLoughlin recorded in 2008.