What was found there belongs to a type of site that turns up with remarkable frequency across Ireland: the fulacht fia, essentially a Bronze Age outdoor cooking facility, typically consisting of a water-filled trough into which fire-heated stones were dropped to bring the water to boiling point. The broken and fire-cracked stones piled up around the trough over time, forming the characteristic burnt mound that archaeologists look for today.

The two fulachta fia at Dukesmeadows were uncovered during monitoring for the Kilkenny Flood-Relief Scheme and subsequently excavated by Stevens in 2002. Together they formed a single sprawling burnt mound, roughly 20 metres from north to south and 12.5 metres wide, within which four distinct troughs were identified. Radiocarbon dating sent to Glasgow University revealed that the site had two separate phases of use. The northern trough complex, Trough B1, produced a date of approximately 1920 to 1630 BC, placing it in the Middle Bronze Age. Trough A, to the south, dated to between roughly 1390 and 1010 BC, in the Late Bronze Age, suggesting that a second fulacht fia was built on or near the same spot several hundred years after the first had fallen out of use. Some of the troughs showed signs of having been left open for extended periods; Trough B2, a larger and deeper successor cut into the northern group, contained pondweed roots and straw, and Trough B1 itself may once have been lined with wicker, inferred from an arc of stake-holes around its edges. Three stone artefacts were also recovered, among them a broken plano-convex knife made from Antrim flint, a material that had travelled a considerable distance to end up on the Kilkenny flood-plain. Charcoal analysis identified eight wood species used as fuel across the site, including oak, ash, hazel, yew, and apple-type wood, mostly from young branches, which tells us something about the scrubby, managed woodland landscape the people using this site would have moved through.