No earthwork breaks the surface, no marker stone draws the eye, and aerial photography reveals nothing at all. Yet beneath the pasture here lies evidence of prehistoric activity that only came to light because a sewage scheme happened to cut through the ground in the right place.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a type of Bronze Age cooking site, typically identified by a spread of fire-cracked stones and dark, charcoal-rich soil left behind after repeated episodes of heating stones and dropping them into water-filled troughs. The example at Hermitage was identified during archaeological testing carried out in 2001 under licence number 01E0319, when contractors stripped topsoil along the way-leave corridor for the Castleconnell Sewerage Scheme. Excavation, directed under an extension of the same licence and recorded as part of Area C, uncovered a burnt spread measuring 4.6 metres in length, 0.9 metres wide, and 0.4 metres deep, running beneath the northern edge of the corridor. The deposit, catalogued as C35, consisted of loose dark greyish-black sandy silt packed with burnt stones. That the feature ran under the baulk, the unexcavated section of earth left to demarcate the trench edge, suggests the site extends further than what was actually uncovered. The spoil heaps and way-leave were also searched for finds, and the results were unexpectedly varied: several axe fragments came to light alongside 71 fragments of worked flint and 116 of chert, a fine-grained stone commonly knapped for cutting tools. A fording point on the Shannon lies roughly 80 metres to the north-east, which places this site in a landscape that people were clearly moving through and making use of over a long period.

There is no surface expression of the monument, meaning a visitor standing in the field today would have no way of identifying the spot without the excavation records. The site is in private pasture and is not marked on Ordnance Survey historic mapping. Its significance lies less in what can be seen and more in what the 2001 investigation revealed about the density of prehistoric use along this stretch of the Shannon, where a single infrastructure project was enough to uncover a burnt mound, prehistoric stonework, and a lithic assemblage that archaeologists were still analysing at the time the record was compiled.