It came to light not through planned archaeological investigation but through the accident of a sewage treatment plant being built in an adjacent field, a circumstance that briefly exposed what had been hidden for thousands of years before being carefully reburied.

A fulacht fia is a type of Bronze Age cooking place found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough filled with water, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of the cracked, fire-shattered stones that accumulated over repeated use. At Coolroe, topsoil stripping revealed four adjacent spreads of heat-shattered stone and charcoal-rich soil covering an area roughly 5.4 metres by 7.4 metres, sitting at the base of a low hill on the western edge of a boggy hollow, exactly the kind of damp, low-lying location where fulachta fia are most commonly found. One of the spreads formed a distinct rectangular outline measuring 1.6 metres by 0.8 metres, which archaeologists interpreted as a possible infilled trough, the functional core of the site where heated stones would have been dropped into water to bring it to boiling point. Because the site lay just outside the development boundary, it was not excavated. Instead it was recorded, covered in geotextile fabric, and backfilled, with the ground level raised by 1.5 metres to shield it from future interference. Two small worked stones, a flint core and a chert flake, were recovered during recording, quiet traces of the people who used the site.

The site is not accessible or visible to visitors. It sits in pasture, buried and protected, with nothing on the surface to indicate what lies beneath.