The one at Cloonnagleragh, in County Mayo, is typical in its quiet anonymity, a low mound of fire-cracked stone sitting in the land without fanfare, its purpose still generating debate among archaeologists after decades of study.

A fulacht fia, the term drawn from Old Irish and roughly meaning a cooking place or burnt mound, usually consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone surrounding a sunken trough. The working theory, supported by experimental archaeology, is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. This would have allowed large quantities of meat to be cooked efficiently. Most examples in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some have earlier or later phases. They are almost always found near a water source, a stream or spring, which was essential to the process. Mayo has a considerable concentration of them, the county's boggy, well-watered landscape having preserved many that elsewhere were lost to drainage or cultivation.

The specific details of this particular example at Cloonnagleragh remain sparse in the accessible record, which makes it difficult to say much about its exact dimensions, condition, or excavation history. What can be said is that its survival into the present, in a county where the land has seen continuous agricultural use for millennia, is itself quietly remarkable.