It came to light not through deliberate antiquarian interest but because Mayo County Council was testing the ground ahead of a proposed housing development. What the archaeologists found was modest in scale but considerable in age: a thin scatter of fire-cracked sandstone, charcoal, and scorched clay, sitting quietly beneath the bog that had formed over it across four and a half thousand years.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric outdoor cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of heat-shattered stone beside a water-filled trough. Stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil, a practical method that left behind the characteristic burnt and fractured stone. The Saleen example was identified during initial testing in August 2018 and fully excavated in December of the same year. The spread measured roughly six metres east to west and three metres north to south, but was only about ten centimetres deep, suggesting it had been substantially cut away over time, including by a later land drain that truncated its northern edge. No trough survived, and no artefacts were recovered alongside the burnt material. The charcoal fragments proved to be oak and ash, and preserved within the adjacent peat was a deposit of unworked twigs and small branches, kept intact by the waterlogged conditions. Five fragments of animal bone were also recovered, two of which were identified as cattle leg bones, a faint suggestion of the meals or activities that once took place here. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal placed the site at the very end of the Neolithic period or the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, a transitional moment in Irish prehistory when new technologies and social forms were beginning to take hold across the landscape.