This is a fulacht fia, a term used to describe a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically associated with the Bronze Age, in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point. The shattered fragments left behind, along with the dark spread of charcoal, are the characteristic signatures that archaeologists look for, and at Inchanappa they were found precisely where such a site might easily have been overlooked entirely.

The discovery came about not through a dedicated excavation but through routine archaeological test trenching carried out in 2005. That kind of investigative work, involving the mechanical opening of narrow trial trenches across an area ahead of development, often turns up features that would otherwise remain invisible beneath the surface. In this case, the pit was recorded as Site 6 under Excavation Licence 05E1193, with the findings documented by Delaney in the same year. The site at Inchanappa joins a very large inventory of similar features found across Ireland, though the majority attract little attention precisely because they are so numerous and because so much of what they once held has long since dissolved back into the earth.