Someone had written "Canoe" at a particular spot on a set of Ordnance Survey first-edition six-inch maps that had been used by T. J. Westropp, the prolific antiquarian who documented much of the west of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That notation was enough to earn the location a listing as a potential archaeological site, even though the coordinates it pointed to turned out to be about ninety-five metres off the mark.

The canoe itself was found in 1989 and became the subject of a rescue excavation by the National Museum. What made it especially significant was not its age alone, but its function. Analysis revealed that it had served as a trough for a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered, or burnt, stone. The usual arrangement involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough, which would bring the water to a boil. The wooden vessel found at Teeronea fitted that role. Radiocarbon dating placed it at around 1550 BC, firmly in the Bronze Age, and the find was reported in the Clare Champion in August 1991. The precise location of the site, some ninety-five metres east of where the map annotation had placed it, was identified as recently as May 2019, when the landowner pointed it out to the Forest Service. Burnt stone was still visible at the surface at that time, a quiet physical trace of activity stretching back more than three and a half thousand years.