It exists on record as a scorched spread of earth roughly ten metres across, detected not by any deliberate archaeological campaign but by the machinery cutting the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline between 1981 and 1982. A fulacht fia, to give it its Irish name, is a type of outdoor cooking place found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal close to a water source. The stream here runs about sixty metres to the north-west, which fits the pattern precisely: water would have been heated by dropping stones from a fire directly into a trough or pit, allowing meat to be boiled efficiently. The Mullinoly example has never been opened up, so the full extent of what lies below the surface remains unknown.

Its discovery was essentially accidental. Pipeline construction work of that scale, crossing hundreds of kilometres of Irish countryside, inevitably cut through archaeological deposits that had escaped notice for millennia. The site was recorded and published in a 1987 report by Cleary and colleagues, cataloguing finds from that particular stretch of the route. Since then the landscape around it has changed: field boundaries to the north-west, north-east, and south-west have been removed, altering the agricultural geography that once framed the site. Today it leaves no impression at ground level, the burnt spread sitting undisturbed beneath improved pasture, invisible to anyone walking across it.