At a south-facing slope near the southern end of a north-south ridge in Kilmagar, County Kilkenny, a landowner doing exactly that work came across a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. Now invisible at ground level, it sits quietly beneath reclaimed grassland, known only because someone noticed it at the right moment.

Fulachtaí fia are ancient cooking sites, typically Bronze Age in date, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone built up beside a trough, often timber-lined, into which water was poured and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. They tend to cluster near water and on lower, damper ground, which makes a south-facing slope at the end of a ridge a reasonably plausible setting. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is not its singularity but its company: another fulacht fia was identified under similar circumstances, also during reclamation work, roughly 500 metres to the south-east. Two sites, both surfacing through the same kind of agricultural activity, in the same general landscape, suggests that this was not an isolated episode of prehistoric use but part of a broader pattern of activity across the ridge and its surroundings.