A thin spread of grey, clayey earth, barely a metre long and ten centimetres deep, carrying frequent large fragments of charcoal and stones cracked by intense heat, was exposed when a trench was cut through the northwest-facing slope. It is a modest find in physical terms, but it represents a type of site found in remarkable numbers across the Irish landscape.

The feature is a fulacht fia, the remains of a Bronze Age cooking or processing site. The typical form involves a trough, often timber-lined or stone-lined, filled with water, which was then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, once spent, were piled to the side, forming the distinctive horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive across boggy and low-lying ground throughout Ireland. At Knockagolig, the charcoal-rich layer and the burnt-looking stone fragments represent exactly that kind of accumulated debris. Two small heaps of upcast from the forestry trench share the same composition, suggesting the material was spread further than the exposed section alone. The site was recorded by O'Shaughnessy in 1997 and subsequently included in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork. What makes the location additionally interesting is its proximity to a cluster of four further fulachta fiadh lying to the southwest, suggesting that this particular slope in North Cork was returned to, or continuously used, in a pattern that archaeologists recognise at several such groupings around the country.