Buried beneath unremarkable ground was a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a water-filled trough. The basic principle is straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a trough of water to bring it rapidly to a boil, and used to cook meat or process other materials. Thousands of these sites are recorded across the island, yet each excavated example adds something to the picture of how people actually used the land in the distant past.

When archaeological testing was carried out ahead of road improvements on the N2, a burnt mound was identified at Drumgeeny and subsequently excavated in full. What emerged was a spread of broken and fire-cracked stone measuring roughly 7.8 metres east to west and 6.5 metres north to south, with a maximum depth of around 25 centimetres. Beneath its southern edge lay a shallow trough, approximately 2.1 by 1.9 metres, filled with the same burnt material that characterised the mound above it. A larger pit, some 5.5 metres long and 1.8 metres wide, cut into the trough from the north. A sample of alder charcoal taken from the site was radiocarbon dated and returned a result of 3956 plus or minus 30 years before present, calibrating to roughly 2514 to 2346 BC. That places activity here firmly in the Early Bronze Age, when the drumlin-threaded landscape of what is now County Monaghan was being worked and lived in by communities who left little else behind but their hearthstones and their scorched pits.