A fulacht fia is broadly understood to have been a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone built up around a timber-lined trough into which water was poured and heated by dropping in stones from an adjacent fire. The example at Islands would have remained unrecorded beneath its boggy field had a road not arrived to disturb it.

The site came to light in 2006 during excavations carried out in advance of the M8/N8 Cullahill to Cashel Road Improvement Scheme. What was uncovered was a mound roughly 24 metres long and 14.5 metres wide, composed of loose clayey sand packed with charcoal and heat-shattered stone. Beneath this spread, excavators found two troughs and five pits. Radiocarbon dating of timbers below the mound placed the earliest activity between approximately 2120 and 1880 BC, well within the Early Bronze Age. A second phase followed much later: a possible platform identified in the upper levels of the mound returned a date of around 1130 to 910 BC, suggesting the site was returned to and used again during the Middle Bronze Age, centuries after its original construction. The gap between those two phases is long enough to be quietly arresting. Adding a further layer of interest, a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead was recovered from the topsoil close to the mound, a type associated with the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age periods, hinting at human activity in the area even before the mound itself was raised.