A fulacht fia, in its simplest form, is a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the earth, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-warmed stones into it until the water boiled. The stones, repeatedly cracked by thermal shock, were discarded nearby, forming the low, horseshoe-shaped mounds that still dot boggy fields across the country. The example at Moneyatta Commons survived only as a fragment, and even that fragment was in poor condition by the time anyone had a chance to look at it properly.

The site came to light in 2001 during archaeological monitoring of a housing development, the kind of watching brief that archaeologists carry out when construction work breaks ground in areas of potential sensitivity. What the monitoring revealed was a badly damaged trough measuring roughly 1.56 metres in length, 1.5 metres in width, and just 0.27 metres in depth, a shallow basin containing heat-shattered sandstones, the characteristic signature of the fulacht fia's fire-and-water technology. Charcoal recovered from the trough was analysed and found to include alder, ash, holly, and elm, a mix of native woodland species that tells us something about the local vegetation at the time the site was in use, even if it cannot tell us precisely when that was. The findings were published by Doyle in 2003.

There is nothing to see at Moneyatta Commons today. The site was uncovered within the footprint of a housing development, and whatever remained of the trough was almost certainly removed or built over in the course of that work. Its value now is largely in the record rather than the ground, a data point in a wider picture of prehistoric activity across County Dublin. For those interested in fulachtaí fia as a monument type, better-preserved examples can be found elsewhere in Ireland, often in low-lying or marshy ground where the water table was historically high, the same conditions that made such sites practical in the first place.