The example at Newtown in County Limerick offered just that, turning up not simply the charred debris of repeated open-air cooking but a substantial timber-lined pit beneath it, suggesting a more elaborate operation than the blackened surface deposit first implied. A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a type of prehistoric cooking site, usually identified by its distinctive crescent-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone. Water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, and the accumulated waste material, cracked stone, ash, and charcoal, gradually built up around it.

This particular site, designated Newtown D, came to light not through deliberate research but during archaeological monitoring ahead of the construction of the Limerick Southern Ring Road, the section of the M7 that arcs around the south of the city. Excavated under Licence No. 01E0056ext. by archaeologist Avril Hayes, the deposit measured 15.5 metres east to west and 18.4 metres across, reaching a depth of 0.4 metres. It was composed of a moderately loose, dark blackish-brown sandy silt, packed with angular fragments of burnt stone. The upper layers had been heavily disturbed, apparently dragged across the site at some point. Beneath all of this, cut into the ground to the north of the main deposit, was a subcircular pit measuring 5.6 by 4.5 metres and fully 2 metres deep. Its basal fill contained a series of randomly arranged planks and branches, possibly the remnants of a wooden trough lining, along with fragments of animal bone. A hut site was recorded approximately 150 metres to the west, and a second fulacht fia lay around 20 metres to the east, suggesting this was not an isolated episode of activity but part of a broader pattern of use across the landscape.

The site itself is not publicly accessible or marked in any conventional sense; it was excavated in advance of road construction and the M7 now runs through this part of south County Limerick. What remains is the published record, summarised on excavations.ie (2001:788) and in Hayes's own report. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the region, the broader Limerick Southern Ring Road corridor proved to be a remarkably productive stretch, and the excavation reports from its monitoring programme offer a detailed, if technical, account of what the construction crews were rolling over.