The one at Tooreen in County Kerry is a quiet example of a type that once would have been a hive of activity. A fulacht fia, sometimes translated loosely as a cooking place or burnt mound, typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough and a hearth. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, making them extraordinarily efficient for cooking, and possibly for other purposes such as bathing or textile work. The mounds of shattered, blackened stone that remain are the discarded debris of that process, which is why they survive at all.

These sites date predominantly to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some have produced dates stretching into the early medieval period. They tend to cluster near water sources, which were essential to the whole operation, and Kerry, with its abundance of streams, bogland, and low-lying wet ground, has a particularly high concentration of them. The townland of Tooreen sits within this broader Kerry landscape, and the presence of a fulacht fia there fits a pattern repeated across the county and the country, each site a small, anonymous record of repeated, practical activity carried out over generations.