During pre-construction testing at Scartbarry, archaeologists encountered a roughly ten-metre spread of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-darkened soil, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally understood to be Bronze Age cooking or processing places, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. The mound of cracked, fire-damaged stone that accumulates over time is often all that survives.

Excavation in 2003 revealed considerably more complexity than the surface scatter suggested. Beneath the spread lay a series of associated pits and a trough fitted with stake-holes, fed by a stone-flanked channel running on an east-west line and roughly 0.7 metres deep. Around it, a stone-lined slot trench, some four metres in diameter, enclosed the main working area, with post-holes and a defined entrance feature indicating a structure of some kind had stood here. To the east, connected by a step upwards, a second oval-shaped feature was uncovered, its base lined with large stone slabs and its cut further defined by stone walls on the eastern, northern, and southern sides. The two-part layout, with its distinct levels and separate chambers, gives the site an organisational logic that goes well beyond a simple cooking pit. Radiocarbon dating placed the activity in the Early to Middle Bronze Age, suggesting the site was in use somewhere in the broad span between roughly 2000 and 1500 BC.

The site was uncovered and recorded during the road scheme and is no longer accessible as a visible monument above ground, having been documented through the excavation process rather than preserved in place. What remains is the excavation record itself, which gives a clearer picture than most of how these often enigmatic sites were actually organised and used.