The one at Tíorabháin in County Kerry is a quiet example of a feature that has puzzled archaeologists for generations. A fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped or kidney-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, usually found close to a water source. The working theory is that these mounds represent the spoil heaps of a cooking method in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Most date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some were in use earlier or later.

The name itself, loosely translated from Irish, is sometimes rendered as "cooking place of the deer" or "cooking place of the Fianna", the latter a reference to the legendary warrior band of Irish mythology. Neither translation fully explains the range of activities these sites may have supported. Some researchers have proposed that fulachtaí fia were used not only for cooking meat but for bathing, textile processing, or brewing. The site at Tíorabháin sits within a county that contains a particularly dense concentration of Bronze Age activity, the landscape of Kerry having preserved many such features in boggy or low-lying ground where the characteristic mounds of heat-shattered stone survive largely undisturbed.