Before the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass could be built, archaeologists were required to monitor the ground as construction proceeded, and in 2001 that process turned up a fulacht fia at Meenane, preserving its outline just long enough to be recorded before the road went through.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient outdoor cooking place, found in their thousands across Ireland and typically dated to the Bronze Age. The standard arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, and cooking meat by immersion. The Meenane example followed this pattern closely. Excavation revealed a roughly U-shaped spread of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-enriched soil measuring 11.6 metres by 7 metres, though only about 0.2 metres deep at its greatest extent. What the spread enclosed was a central unlined trough, 1.45 metres long, 1.1 metres wide, and 0.32 metres deep, dug directly into the ground without any stone or timber lining. The shattered stones are the tell-tale signature of the process: repeated rapid heating and quenching causes rock to fracture, and over time the spent, cracked material accumulates into the low, burnt mounds that field archaeologists still spot across Irish farmland today. Here, that accumulation was modest but clear, and the trough at its centre gave the whole arrangement its purpose and its shape.