Somewhere in a rough, rushy field in County Kildare, a Bronze Age cooking site was dug up, identified, and promptly reburied, leaving the landscape almost exactly as it was found. The site at Mountprospect is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking place found in great numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of heat-shattered stone accumulated beside a water source and a wooden or stone trough in which water was boiled by dropping in fire-heated rocks. What distinguishes Mountprospect is the particular quiet indignity of its rediscovery: during land reclamation works in the mid-1960s, workers uncovered a wooden trough and burnt stone, the two defining signatures of a fulacht fia, and then reinterred them. The mound remains in the ground, largely undisturbed.

The site sits on level, wet, rushy pasture roughly 400 metres south of the Slate River, which runs westward through this part of Kildare, and immediately north of the Grand Canal's Athy Branch. That waterlogged setting is entirely characteristic. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found close to streams, rivers, or boggy ground, both because water was essential to the cooking process and because such marginal, wet land was less likely to be ploughed up or built over in later centuries. The mound itself is sub-circular, measuring around 27.5 metres across its longest axis and between 0.2 and 0.8 metres high, low enough to read as a slight grassy rise rather than anything obviously archaeological. It is girdled by a broad, wet band of lower ground, two to six metres wide, which runs off to the north and north-west and may trace the course of a long-dried stream, the original water source the Bronze Age users of this place would have relied upon.