Yet the dark, charcoal-rich soil and the scatter of fire-cracked stones it once contained point toward a form of prehistoric cooking that was once widespread across the Irish landscape, and which continues to puzzle archaeologists in its precise details.

The feature was excavated by Ken Wiggins under licence reference 02E0302, and the recorded dimensions give a sense of just how modest it was: 1.1 metres long, 1 metre wide, and only 0.3 metres deep. The fill was a crumbly, dark grey-brown clay, rich with charcoal and burnt stone fragments. Those burnt stones are the telling detail. They are the signature material of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point. The stones, subjected repeatedly to intense heat and sudden immersion, eventually shattered, and accumulated in characteristic mounds beside the trough. At Leahys, the northern edge of the pit had been cut by a later drain running north-east to south-west; the excavated length of that drain was 3.4 metres, and toward its northern end it contained flat limestone packing stones, suggesting some deliberate construction. Two small stake-holes were also recorded in the subsoil on either side of the drain, each only a few centimetres across, hinting at some kind of lightweight structure, though their precise function remains unclear. No other material was recovered from the site in situ.

The excavation record is held on excavations.ie, the principal online database for Irish archaeological fieldwork reports, where the full site description compiled by Denis Power can be consulted. Because what survives here is a subsurface feature rather than any visible upstanding remains, there is nothing for a casual visitor to observe at ground level today. The value of the site lies in the record itself, which adds one more data point to the broad distribution of fulacht fiadh activity across Munster, and serves as a reminder of how much prehistoric evidence survives only because it happened to fall in the path of a drainage scheme or a development groundwork, and was caught just in time.