During topsoil stripping along the route of the Caherbeg-Ballincollig Bord Gáis Éireann pipeline, archaeologists monitoring the works came across a spread of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-enriched soil at Monard, Co. Cork, at least fifteen metres by ten metres in extent. What they had found was a fulacht fia, the Irish term for a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, characterised by the accumulation of fire-cracked stones that were heated and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil.

Excavation in 1999 uncovered the trough itself, a rectangular, straight-sided cut measuring roughly 2.1 metres east to west and 1.8 metres north to south, sunk to a depth of 0.65 metres, with a base that sloped slightly northward. It had no surviving lining, just layers of silt and shattered stone sealed beneath a further 0.4 metres of heat-fractured material and charcoal in loose soil, the accumulated debris of repeated use. Immediately to the east of the trough, a shallow horseshoe-shaped cut, about 1.85 metres by 1.25 metres and 0.25 metres deep, with what may have been kerb stones at its edges, was interpreted as the remains of a hearth, the place where stones were heated before being transferred to the trough. The site was not alone in the landscape: another fulacht fia lies approximately 180 metres to the south-east, suggesting this stretch of ground saw regular, perhaps seasonal, prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated episode.