This one exists only as a memory of heat and breakage. In a field beside a tributary of the Owenascaul river in Ballynacourty, County Kerry, an area of burnt, shattered stones came to light during field clearance. Once the stones were disturbed, whatever pattern they had held was gone, and today no surface trace of the site survives at all.

The feature belongs to a category known in Irish archaeology as a burnt spread, closely related to the more familiar fulacht fiadh, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The working principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water to a boil; repeated heating and rapid cooling eventually fractured the stones into the characteristic shattered, fire-reddened rubble that archaeologists recognise on sight. Such spreads tend to cluster near water sources, which explains the location here beside a river tributary. Whether this particular site was used for cooking, textile processing, bathing, or some combination of purposes remains, as with most fulachta, an open question. The Ballynacourty example was recorded as part of the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, published in 1986 under the direction of J. Cuppage, a systematic effort to document the remarkable density of prehistoric and early historic remains across the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula.

There is nothing to see here now. The field clearance that revealed the site also effectively ended it as a visible feature in the landscape, leaving only the record of what the stones looked like when they came up out of the ground.