It is, in fact, a fulacht fia, one of thousands of prehistoric cooking sites scattered across the Irish landscape, and one of the more understated traces of organised human activity that the boggy midlands and western counties have preserved over millennia.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking place. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the ground, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. Once spent, those stones were piled to the side, forming the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. The example at Corrower follows this pattern closely. It measures roughly fifteen metres on its longer axis and eleven metres across, rising only about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Along its north-western edge, a shallow U-shaped depression, two and a half to three metres across, may mark the original position of the trough. The mound itself is compact and grass-covered, though where farm animals have worn away the sod, the interior material becomes visible: dense concentrations of stone fragments packed into dark soil, exactly what one would expect from centuries of repeated heating and discard. The site sits at the edge of a flat, low-lying valley where the ground is persistently damp, a setting that is entirely typical for this class of monument, since a reliable water source was essential to the whole process.