The field in question is low-lying, damp pasture, the kind of ground that sits unremarkably between rises of drier land to either side. No mound breaks the surface, no marker draws the eye. Yet beneath the grass lies a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking sites found across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in origin, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. This one was levelled at some point in the past, erasing the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that usually signals such a site from a distance.

The site came to light during pre-development archaeological testing carried out in July and August 2017, under licence 17E0324. When a test trench was opened, it revealed a spread of heat-shattered stones, roughly eight metres across in one direction and between 3.8 and 4.3 metres in the other, sitting in a matrix of black, charcoal-rich soil. That dark, scorched earth is the hallmark of a fulacht fia: centuries of burning and boiling leave a distinctive stain that survives long after the mound itself has been ploughed or worn away. No further excavation followed. The site was re-covered, and a buffer zone was established to keep it outside the footprint of the proposed development, leaving whatever else lies beneath undisturbed.