There is nothing to see at this site. That is, in a sense, the whole point. Somewhere in the pasture at the headwaters of a small south-to-north stream in Reatagh, Co. Waterford, lies what remains of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland. These features typically consisted of a trough, often timber-lined, that was filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, once shattered and spent, were piled up into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive in their thousands across the Irish countryside. This one does not survive, at least not above ground. It has been destroyed, and nothing of it is visible at ground level today.

What we know of the Reatagh site is modest but specific. In 1961 a sample of the burnt stones from the destroyed mound was deposited in the National Museum of Ireland, which means that at some point prior to that, someone recognised the scatter of fire-cracked material for what it was and thought it worth preserving a portion. That act of collection is itself a small piece of history, a reminder that the mid-twentieth century saw growing awareness of how quickly such sites were vanishing under agricultural improvement and land clearance. The location at the headwaters of a stream fits a well-established pattern; fulachtaí fiadh are almost always found near water, which was the essential ingredient in the whole process, whether the troughs were used for cooking, textile preparation, or bathing, a question archaeologists have not definitively settled.