The site at Shinanagh is a fulacht fia, the term used for a class of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a trough that would have been repeatedly heated and flooded with water. This one sat quietly unnoticed until pipeline engineers arrived.

The site came to light in 1988 during construction of the Bruff-Mallow gas pipeline, when a semicircular spread of burnt material measuring 11.4 metres in length was cut through, extending roughly four metres into the pipeline corridor. The main body of the site, a low and poorly defined mound, lay just to the west of the corridor and so survived largely undisturbed. What the pipeline also revealed, perhaps more surprisingly, was that this was not an isolated find: a second fulacht fia lies approximately 17 metres to the north. The clustering of such sites is not unusual, as fulachtaí fia are often found in groups near water sources, but encountering two within such a short distance of each other on low-lying ground underlines how densely this kind of activity once marked the Irish landscape, even in places that now appear entirely unremarkable.