Only when a plough turns the soil does the site announce itself, in the form of dark earth and fragments of heat-cracked stone. These are the telltale signs of 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 or processing site. The typical arrangement involves a trough, often timber-lined or cut into the ground, filled with water and heated by dropping fire-scorched stones into it. Those stones, once shattered by repeated thermal shock, were discarded into a mound beside the trough. Over time, these mounds of blackened, burnt stone built up into the low, horseshoe-shaped features that archaeologists recognise across Ireland today. At Boleynanoultagh, no mound appears to survive above ground, but the discolouration of the subsoil and the presence of burnt stone just beneath the turf confirm that something of the site remains intact below the surface, quietly preserved under pasture. Local knowledge, passed down informally, has kept awareness of the spot alive, with people noticing the dark soil and burnt material each time the field was worked.