They appear as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone, the accumulated debris of repeated heating and cooling, and they cluster especially around wetlands and watercourses. The example at Inchanappa in County Wicklow is unremarkable in that company, until the numbers are considered: a mound stretching 30 metres north-west to south-east and 14 metres across, with a circular trough and three small pits buried beneath it.

A fulacht fia, in broad terms, is understood to have functioned as a cooking site, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the contents to a boil. The trough at Inchanappa was the source of a radiocarbon date placing the site in the Early Bronze Age, somewhere in the broad span between roughly 2500 and 1500 BC. The site was one of three fulachtaí fia identified in the same area during archaeological monitoring carried out under Excavation Licence 04E1334 in 2004, a process that involves watching groundworks or construction activity for signs of buried archaeology. It was then formally excavated the following year under a separate licence, with the detailed findings later published by Mc Loughlin in 2008. The fact that three such monuments were found in close proximity at Inchanappa suggests repeated or sustained prehistoric activity in this part of Wicklow, though what exactly drew people back to the same ground, again and again, for long enough to leave three separate mounds, remains an open question.