During monitoring ahead of construction, archaeologists uncovered a fulacht fia at Curraheen, one of the most common yet still somewhat mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia is, in essence, a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a water-filled trough into which heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The stones, cracked and shattered by the repeated thermal shock, were piled into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound nearby. Thousands of these sites survive across Ireland, and their sheer number tells us something about how persistently and routinely this method was used, even if questions remain about whether cooking was their only purpose.

The site was excavated in 2002 and revealed a rectangular trough measuring 2.7 metres by 1.4 metres and just under a third of a metre deep, packed with heat-shattered stones and charcoal-enriched soil, the telltale residue of sustained, repeated burning. Cutting into the south-eastern edge of the trough was a smaller oval pit, roughly 0.85 metres by 0.6 metres and deeper at 0.52 metres, similarly filled with the same fire-worked material. Both features had been sliced through at some later point by a north-south field drain, a quiet reminder that agricultural land management has been quietly erasing prehistoric sites for centuries. What makes Curraheen particularly notable is not this single trough in isolation but the density of activity it represents. The excavation uncovered a cluster of six fulachtaí fia and burnt mounds in the immediate area, with two further possible examples lying within roughly twenty metres to the north and north-east. That concentration suggests this low-lying ground near Curraheen was returned to again and again over time, perhaps across generations, for whatever communal or practical purpose these sites served.