This particular example, one of the four, sits on a flat terrace just above the basin floor, roughly 38 metres from its nearest neighbour. What marks it out is not its grandeur but its accidental revelation: it was exposed not through formal excavation but through small test cuttings made around 1991 to see whether the surrounding peat was worth harvesting.

A fulacht fia, in simple terms, is a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough or pit in which water was heated using stones brought to temperature in an open fire. Thousands survive across Ireland, mostly dating to the Bronze Age, and their concentration in boggy ground is no coincidence; wet, low-lying terrain was exactly where these sites were used. At Capnagower, the four de-sodded cuttings, none deeper than 0.2 metres and covering modest surface areas, turned up a mass of that characteristic heat-fractured stone. The material is there, but the cuttings were too small and too shallow to indicate how far the deposit extends or how deep it goes. The maximum traceable spread runs about 6.3 metres on its long axis and 3.4 metres across, though those figures represent only what chance has uncovered rather than the true extent of the site.