A fulacht fia is, in simple terms, an outdoor cooking place used in prehistoric Ireland, typically involving a trough filled with water that was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. This one at Carrickmines was not discovered by any planned archaeological investigation, but by the mechanical stripping of topsoil ahead of the South-Eastern Motorway, now the M50.

What emerged from that ground-clearance was a spread of decayed and burnt stone measuring roughly nine metres in length and twenty metres in width, covering two possible troughs beneath. The scale suggests sustained use over time rather than a single occasion. A sherd of Early Bronze Age pottery was recovered from the fill, placing the site broadly in the period around 2000 to 1500 BC, though fulachta fia as a type span a wide chronological range across Ireland and Britain. The find was recorded by O'Reilly in 2004 and later compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy as part of a wider survey effort.

Because the site was uncovered during road construction, it no longer exists in any accessible or visible form; the motorway itself now runs through the area. What remains is the documentary record, which nonetheless places Carrickmines within a broader pattern of Bronze Age activity along what is now the southern fringes of Dublin. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the M50 corridor, the published record by O'Reilly offers the most direct account of what was found, and the circumstances of its discovery serve as a useful reminder of how much prehistoric material has surfaced, and been lost, in the path of modern infrastructure.