But these pits are the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough, a hearth, and a mound of fire-cracked stone. The method is thought to have involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, an efficient if labour-intensive way to cook meat. The Danesfort example, sitting in gently undulating farmland, would have drawn its water from a pond roughly forty metres to the south-west, the nearest source available on what was presumably a reasonably flat, workable piece of ground.

The site came to light in 2007, excavated under licence as part of the road improvement works on the N9/N10 route between Kilcullen and Waterford. That corridor of roadwork, like so many infrastructure projects of the same era, produced a remarkable volume of archaeological discovery as machinery exposed layers that had lain undisturbed for centuries. Among the seven pits uncovered at Danesfort, one stood out: it contained stake-holes and bore the shape of a trough, suggesting this was the functional core of the cooking area. The rest of the pits, packed with the characteristic debris of repeated heating and quenching, charcoal and fractured stone, represent the accumulated waste of what may have been many separate episodes of use. Complicating the picture slightly, a post-medieval field boundary had been cut directly through several of the pits, a reminder that the landscape was reorganised and farmed long after the original activity here had been forgotten.