When construction crews were laying the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline across County Cork, they disturbed the remains of a Bronze Age cooking site that had lain undisturbed on a north-facing slope for roughly three thousand years. The site was excavated in September 1982, and what emerged was a remarkably well-preserved example of a fulacht fia, the term used for the characteristic mounds of fire-cracked stone left behind by ancient outdoor cooking or heating activity. Ireland has thousands of them, mostly dating to the Bronze Age, yet the physical details rarely survive as clearly as they did here.

The excavation uncovered a pit measuring four metres long and nearly three metres wide, and within it a wooden trough, roughly 1.4 metres by 1.45 metres, constructed with some care. Oak twigs had been laid across the base, and the eastern and northern sides were faced with oak planks. The southern side was more unusual, combining a stone slab with an oak plank arranged to form a step-like feature. The basic principle of a fulacht fia involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to raise the temperature; the trough here would have held that water. Radiocarbon dating of the wood gave a date of 3185 plus or minus 30 years before present, placing its use firmly in the Bronze Age. The hearth where those stones were heated survived as a patch of oxidised, reddened clay, bisected unfortunately by a modern drain, with a semi-circular arrangement of ten to twelve stones on its south-eastern side. The excavator noted that the characteristic mound of burnt and discarded stone, originally roughly semi-circular in shape, appears to have been deliberately broken up and used to backfill the pit itself once the site was abandoned. Some eighty metres to the north, a second fulacht fia was recorded, suggesting this small corner of the Cork landscape saw repeated, perhaps seasonal, use across the Bronze Age.