By 1987, the mound that had been clearly visible and carefully measured just decades earlier had vanished from ground level entirely, absorbed into the vegetation beside the waterway it had once depended upon.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, though theories about their use range from cooking meat to brewing or bathing. The Askinch example appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the older spelling "fulacht fian", and a field description from the same year records an oval mound roughly 14 metres along its longer axis and 9 metres across, standing between one and a half and two metres high, composed of broken and burnt stone. It sat on the north-east bank of a stream running roughly north-west to south-east, precisely the kind of waterside position these sites almost always occupy. By the time anyone looked again in 1987, the scrubland had closed over it completely, and nothing was visible at ground level.