Yet this bowl-shaped hollow in the ground at Ballincurra once held a fire, and almost everything else about it, who lit it, when, and why, remains genuinely unknown. It never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic map, and before a gas pipeline came through, there was no reason to think anything lay beneath the grass at all.

The site came to light in 2002 during topsoil-stripping associated with the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, a large infrastructure project that, almost incidentally, produced a significant quantity of archaeological data across the Irish midlands and west. Recorded as feature BGE 3/76/1, the hearth was excavated that same year by archaeologist Kate Taylor under licence 02E0480. What she found was a subcircular pit with two distinct fills: a mid-brown sandy silt carrying frequent charcoal flecks and small stones, and beneath that a bright orange sandy clay with only occasional charcoal and stones. Around the edge of the cut, a halo of oxidised natural clay up to 0.15 metres wide had been baked into the surrounding ground, clear physical evidence that sustained heat had once been applied here. No artefacts were recovered. The charcoal retrieved from sieved samples was too sparse to make radiocarbon dating viable, which means the feature cannot be placed in any period with confidence. Taylor's own published assessment, included in the pipeline report compiled by Grogan and colleagues in 2007, noted frankly that the purpose and date of this isolated feature remain unknown, and that whether it served a domestic or industrial function is impossible to say.

The monument has been fully excavated and nothing is visible on the surface today. The field lies north of a watercourse in pasture, and there is no public monument or marker. For most visitors, this site exists only on paper, in the excavation archive and the pipeline report rather than in any landscape you can walk through. Its interest lies precisely in that incompleteness; a fire was lit here at some point in the past, the ground was scorched, and then silence. The record ends there.