The episode is a peculiarly modern way to lose something ancient, and what made it worse was that the sieving of the disturbed material confirmed beyond doubt what had been there: burnt and fire-shattered stone, charcoal, the unmistakable signature of a fulacht fiadh.

Burnt mounds, as these features are commonly known, are among the most widespread prehistoric monument types in Ireland. They are the accumulated debris of a cooking or heating process in which stones were fired and then plunged into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a technique used repeatedly over time until the cracked and spent stones were raked aside into a crescentic or oval heap. The two mounds at Dromavally sat roughly 25 metres north of a nearby enclosure, in ground that is described as relatively marshy and prone to holding water after heavy rain, exactly the kind of damp, low-lying setting these features consistently occupy. The larger of the two, the more westerly one, measured 4.3 metres by 3.3 metres and stood 0.31 metres high; the smaller, to the east, was 3.1 metres by 3 metres and only 0.22 metres in height. Neither showed a distinct trough, which can sometimes survive as a visible depression at the centre or edge of such mounds, though the waterlogged character of the surrounding land may account for that absence. The details come from research by Michael Connolly, whose 2008 doctoral thesis examined prehistoric settlement across the Lee Valley near Tralee from a landscape perspective, placing these modest, now-vanished features within a broader pattern of ancient human activity across this part of Kerry.