It does not look like much from a distance, but the burnt stone visible within it tells a different story, one stretching back thousands of years to a form of prehistoric cooking, or possibly bathing or industrial working, that left its traces across the Irish landscape in the hundreds.

A fulacht fia, the term used by archaeologists and borrowed from early Irish sources, typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped or roughly rectangular mound of heat-shattered stone accumulated beside a water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water rapidly to the boil. Repeated heating and sudden cooling causes the stones to crack and eventually become useless, and so they were discarded into the growing mound beside the trough. The site at Killeely More follows this pattern closely, positioned beside the river in the kind of wet, low-lying ground that would have guaranteed a ready water supply. Its mound measures nine metres east to west and 7.4 metres north to south, and it is described as well-preserved, which is notable given how easily such earthworks can be damaged by drainage works or agricultural activity. The burnt stone remains visible within it, a small but direct piece of physical evidence connecting the site to whatever activity took place here in prehistory.