While digging for a septic tank, workers uncovered three stones set on edge, arranged to form three sides of a trough-like feature, with burnt and heat-shattered stones in the surrounding material. The landowner, uncertain about what lay beneath, decided to stop work rather than continue. The suspicion that it might be a burial was enough to leave the site undisturbed.

What was likely exposed is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying or waterlogged ground. The typical arrangement involved a trough, often timber-lined or stone-built, filled with water that was then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The mounds of discarded burnt stone that accumulate around these sites are their most recognisable signature, and the heat-shattered material here fits that pattern well. They are generally dated to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some examples fall outside that range. The three upright stones at Gort Na Lobhar represent only a fragment of what such a feature would originally have comprised, preserved almost by accident beneath a field that had no reason to be disturbed until modern drainage works required it.