During routine archaeological monitoring at the course, investigators uncovered a burnt mound, the kind of low, dark spread of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-rich soil that crops up across the Irish countryside with a frequency that still manages to surprise. This one sat to the west of the Owendoher River, quietly overlooked for millennia, until the groundwork associated with the club's development brought it back to the surface.

A fulacht fia, to give the feature its Irish name, is essentially an open-air cooking or processing site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and then dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, a technique that leaves behind exactly the kind of heat-shattered stone scatter found here. At Rathfarnham, archaeologists working from a report by Reid in 2002 recorded several stone-filled pits alongside the mound itself. One of these was identified as a probable trough, the central working vessel of the whole operation, and unusually it retained evidence of a timber frame: four posts, one set into each corner of the subrectangular pit, suggesting the trough may originally have been lined or reinforced with wood. A charcoal sample taken from the pit was radiocarbon dated to 3700 plus or minus 60 years before present, placing activity at the site somewhere in the middle Bronze Age, roughly 1700 BCE or thereabouts.

The site is not accessible to the public in any formal sense, sitting as it does within private golf club grounds. Its significance lies less in what a visitor might see today, since burnt mounds rarely leave dramatic surface traces, and more in what its discovery says about the landscape along the Owendoher valley. The river, which flows southward through Rathfarnham before joining the Dodder, would have made this a practical spot for the water-dependent work of fulacht fia use. Archaeological monitoring of development sites, the kind of watching brief that flagged this find in the first place, continues to recover traces of Bronze Age activity in corners of County Dublin that later centuries of settlement have otherwise thoroughly obscured.