At Monadreela in County Tipperary, the groundwork for the N8 Cashel Bypass and the N74 Link Road South brought to light a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking or processing sites scattered across the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia, in its simplest form, is a site where water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough or pit; the burnt and shattered stones, discarded once they cracked and cooled, typically accumulate into a distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened debris. The Monadreela example was found in low-lying ground at the margin of what had been a seasonally flooded wetland, or possibly the edge of a former lake, exactly the kind of damp, water-adjacent setting where these sites consistently appear.

The trough itself was oval, measuring roughly 1.9 metres by 1.6 metres and only about 0.2 metres deep, with sides that sloped gently down to an uneven but broadly flat base. When excavated, it was packed with a blackish-brown clay containing decayed and burnt sandstone and charcoal, the characteristic leavings of repeated heating and quenching. Two further spreads of the same scorched material were found nearby, one approximately three metres to the west and another about eight metres to the north, suggesting repeated activity across a small area rather than a single, contained episode of use. The excavation, reported by Hughes and O'Flanagan in 2003, also revealed a ring-ditch about fifty metres to the west, and a cluster of pits and post-holes in the same general direction, one of which contained Bronze Age pottery. That combination points to a broader prehistoric presence in this low-lying corner of Tipperary, with people returning to, or continuing to occupy, the same patch of ground across what may have been a considerable span of time.