At Ballycahane in County Limerick, a prehistoric cooking site known as a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least visited categories of ancient monument in Ireland, survived long enough underground to be properly recorded before vanishing from view entirely. By the time archaeologists returned to check on it in 2000, there was nothing left to see at the surface.

The site came to light in 1986 when archaeologist Claire Walsh was carrying out monitoring work during topsoil stripping for the Irish Gas pipeline. She logged it as Site 2/38/2. A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the term, typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone surrounding a wood-lined trough, believed to have been used for heating water by dropping fire-heated stones into it, most likely for cooking. At Ballycahane, the mound had already been flattened before Walsh arrived, but a slight rise in the ground just outside the pipeline corridor suggested the trough itself might have escaped disturbance. Trenching proved that instinct partly right. The trough was found in section, measuring 1.80 metres in length and 60 centimetres deep. No timber lining had survived, but a layer of silt at the base contained abundant charcoal and fragments of wood, the remnants of whatever fuel or structural material had once been part of the site. No objects were recovered.

There is, practically speaking, nothing for a visitor to see at Ballycahane today. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland confirmed as much when they visited in 2000 and found no surface remains. The value of the site lies less in what it looks like now and more in what the 1986 monitoring captured before the ground was fully disturbed, a small but methodical record of something Bronze Age communities across Ireland repeated thousands of times in low-lying, waterlogged ground near streams. Researchers interested in the distribution of such sites across Limerick can cross-reference the record through excavations.ie using the site number logged by Walsh, and a Google Earth orthoimage from June 2018 is attached to the compiled record for spatial reference.