It is easy to walk past, easy to mistake for a natural rise in the land. But this modest hump, roughly ten metres across and barely more than half a metre high, is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is essentially a Bronze Age cooking site. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the ground, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The shattered, heat-spent stones were thrown aside after use, and over centuries these waste heaps accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today, usually appearing as a slight swelling in low, wet ground. The location here is characteristic: the mound sits in low-lying pastureland prone to flooding, about twenty metres north of a spring. Water was not a problem to be avoided at these sites but a resource to be exploited. What is slightly unusual about Ballynamanagh is that it is not alone. A second, similar mound lies roughly forty-five metres to the south-south-east, suggesting that this particular stretch of ground was returned to, perhaps repeatedly, over a long period, or that it supported some activity substantial enough to require more than one site in close proximity.