It took an aerial photograph to reveal it: a circular cropmark roughly fifteen metres across, the kind of faint signature that a buried feature leaves on growing vegetation when the soil moisture or chemistry differs from the surrounding earth. What lay beneath was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least-understood monument types in the Irish archaeological record. These are prehistoric cooking sites, essentially, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil. The process left behind characteristic mounds of shattered, fire-cracked stone, which is how most fulachta fiadh are identified today.

Excavation at Charlesland uncovered a large burnt mound sealing eleven separate troughs, along with a scatter of pits, post-holes, and gullies, suggesting the site saw repeated and perhaps organised activity over time. A charcoal sample taken from one of the troughs was radiocarbon dated to between 1710 and 1690 cal. BC, placing this particular episode of use firmly in the Earlier Bronze Age. A palisade trench, a defensive or enclosing feature made from upright wooden stakes set into a continuous dug channel, was identified to the south and east of the mound and produced a later date, between 1400 and 1120 cal. BC. The two phases do not simply overlap; they suggest the landscape around Charlesland was being used and reused across several centuries, with the cooking site predating the enclosure by some margin. These findings were published by Molloy in 2007, drawing on work carried out under excavation licence 04E0744.