What they found was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia is essentially a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, typically consisting of a trough filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it, beside a mound of those same discarded, shattered stones. At Danganbeg, even that mound had largely disappeared; only a dark organic stain in the soil indicated where the burnt material had once accumulated.

The site was excavated in 2007 ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme, under licence E3606. Within the excavated area, two troughs and two pits were uncovered. The first trough was subrectangular in shape and had four post or stake-holes cut into its base, suggesting it was once lined or reinforced with timber. A small pit to the east of this trough was noted but its purpose remained unclear. The second trough lay further east and was ringed by no fewer than twenty stake-holes around its edges, implying a more elaborate wooden structure, possibly a frame or lining, than a casual glance at such sites might suggest. Radiocarbon dating of samples from both troughs returned results clustering in the mid-second millennium BC, specifically 1874 to 1641 cal BC and 1740 to 1630 cal BC, placing activity here firmly in the Early to Middle Bronze Age. The dates from the two troughs overlap closely, raising the possibility that both were in use at roughly the same period rather than representing separate episodes centuries apart.