In 2006, during monitoring work for a third tailings pond at Galmoy Mines in County Kilkenny, excavators uncovered a dark, irregular spread of burnt and fire-shattered stones lying on level ground across the low-lying plain of the River Gaul. The site turned out to be a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a stone-lined trough for boiling water and a surrounding mound of cracked, heat-shattered stones discarded after repeated heating. What made this discovery particularly striking was that a second fulacht fia was found approximately 35 metres to the south-east, suggesting the area saw repeated, possibly organised prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated episode.

The site itself measured roughly 19 metres by 20 metres across its outer spread of ash-like material and burnt stone, with a more concentrated central area of about 4 by 5 metres that may represent the original trough. The deposit was only around 0.1 metres thick, shallow enough to have been easily missed, and some further satellite features were noted to the west of the main concentration. Archaeological work carried out under excavation licence 06E0298, with findings published by O'Connor in 2006 and again in 2009, recorded the monument carefully before it was preserved in situ, meaning it was left in the ground rather than removed or dismantled. The proximity of two such sites to one another in this riverside plain raises questions that the monitoring excavation could not fully answer, about whether these represent different periods of use, different functions, or simply the practical appeal of a reliable, low-lying water source.