This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically interpreted as a Bronze Age cooking or food-processing facility. The process involved heating stones in a nearby fire until they were intensely hot, then plunging them into a water-filled trough; the stones eventually shatter from the thermal shock, and the broken, blackened fragments accumulate in the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that marks many such sites across the landscape.

The Cherrywood example came to light in 1998, not through a planned excavation but through routine topsoil monitoring, the kind of watching brief that often accompanies ground disturbance ahead of development. What emerged was an irregularly shaped spread of burnt stone, entirely granite and up to 25 centimetres in length, mixed with charcoal across an area measuring 7.1 metres north to south and 3.6 metres east to west. Beneath the north-eastern corner of this deposit lay the trough itself, and it turned out to have been used in two distinct phases. The original trough was relatively narrow, measuring 1.8 metres by 0.5 metres and up to 0.8 metres deep, with post-holes surviving at each corner, the ghosts of a timber lining that once kept the structure watertight. At some later point the trough was recut on a larger scale, expanding to 2.05 metres by 1.35 metres, with five post-holes visible along each of its long sides. Both phases had filled with a sticky grey clay containing burnt granite and charcoal. No datable finds were recovered, but the site is considered probably Bronze Age in date, as recorded by O Neill in 1999 and compiled subsequently by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy.

The site is not accessible as a visitor destination; it was identified during monitoring works and the area has since been subject to the kind of ongoing development that has transformed much of south Dublin. The interest here lies less in what you can see on the ground today and more in what the discovery represents: the quiet accumulation of prehistoric activity beneath terrain that has been farmed, drained, and built upon for centuries. The cobble-filled field drain cutting across the western edge of the site is a small reminder of how many layers of human use a single piece of ground can carry.