It is easy to walk past without a second thought, but that spread of burnt material, at least eight metres across, is the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland. The basic principle involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and using the boiling water to cook meat. Over repeated use, the cracked and spent stones were raked aside, and it is the accumulated mounds of this shattered, fire-blackened material that survive in the landscape today.

What makes the Gooseberryhill site particularly interesting is that it does not stand alone. It belongs to a cluster of six fulachta fiadh in the same area, a concentration that suggests repeated, perhaps seasonal, use of this stretch of land over a considerable period. The site was already visible as a small mound on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1936, which means it had enough topographic presence to be recorded by cartographers working decades before modern archaeological survey methods came into play. Fulachta fiadh are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, with thousands identified across the country, and they cluster reliably near water, which made the boggy, stream-side ground at Gooseberryhill a logical setting. The reclaimed marshy character of the land here is itself a clue to why so many were sited in similar spots: reliable water and soft ground for digging a trough went together naturally.