It emerged not through a planned excavation but through routine topsoil monitoring in 1998, when archaeologists identified what is known as a fulacht fiadh, an ancient cooking site typically consisting of a trough, often timber-lined, used to heat water by dropping fire-heated stones into it. The burnt and shattered stones that accumulate over repeated use form the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives in the landscape, sometimes for millennia, long after the activity itself has ceased.

What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is the precision with which its age has been pinned down. A timber sample recovered from the fulacht fiadh was subjected to dendrochronological analysis, a technique that reads the annual growth rings preserved in ancient wood and matches them against established sequences to produce a calendar date. The result, published by Brady in 2000, placed the timber at 2852 BC, give or take nine years. That puts it firmly in the Neolithic period, making it one of the earlier dated examples of this type of site in Ireland. Fulachtaí fia are overwhelmingly associated with the Bronze Age, which makes a securely dated Neolithic example worth noting. The work was compiled by archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy.

The site sits within the barony of Rathdown, a stretch of south County Dublin with a surprisingly dense archaeological record beneath its suburban surface. Because the fulacht fiadh was identified during monitoring rather than full excavation, details of its full extent and condition are limited in the public record. Visitors with an interest in prehistoric Dublin should approach this one as a landscape curiosity rather than a visible monument; there is no marked feature to see on the ground. The value here lies in knowing that the ordinary-looking terrain around Jamestown was once the setting for organised communal activity in the Neolithic, and that a piece of timber placed there nearly five thousand years ago survived long enough to be dated with a margin of error of less than a decade.