When Bord Gáis Éireann began laying infrastructure through the western flood-plain of the River Nore in the late 1990s, archaeological monitors watching the groundworks noticed something in the soil that warranted a closer look. What emerged, excavated in August 1999, was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape. These prehistoric cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically consist of a trough for heating water and a surrounding mound of shattered, fire-cracked stone, the discarded waste of countless heating episodes. The Parksgrove example proved to be a more complex specimen than many.

At the centre of the monument, excavators uncovered not one but three separate troughs clustered together. Two were sub-circular pits of roughly similar proportions, one measuring about 2.2 metres in diameter and 0.8 metres deep, the other slightly smaller at 1.7 metres across and 0.9 metres deep. Each had an associated post-hole nearby, suggesting some kind of timber structure once stood above or beside them. The third trough was rectangular with rounded edges, measuring 2.8 metres by 1.6 metres, and was notable for its lining of bright grey putty clay some 0.3 metres thick. Along its eastern edge, a tight cluster of shallow stake-holes hinted at a lightweight wooden frame or lining, perhaps to keep the clay walls stable. All three troughs had been deliberately backfilled with burnt mound material when they fell out of use. A small whetstone, a hand-held sharpening stone, was recovered from the lower backfill of the rectangular trough, a quiet domestic detail amid the otherwise functional debris. Sealing all three was a roughly circular burnt mound stretching 21 metres north to south and more than 11 metres east to west, composed almost entirely of fire-cracked sandstone mixed with charcoal and black silt. An informal hearth area to the south of the trough complex was preserved within this same deposit. Later ploughing and drainage work had shaved down the upper surface of the mound before it could be properly recorded.