To a passing eye it reads as little more than a low rise in a field, but it is a fulacht fia, the remains of an ancient outdoor cooking site. These monuments, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically consist of a trough dug into the ground beside a water source, into which heated stones were dropped to boil water for cooking. The stones crack and shatter with repeated use, and over centuries the discarded fragments build up into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives today.

This particular example at Knocklagh was noted by Bowman in 1934, who recorded it among four such sites clustered on the land of a D. Fitzgerald. The mound Bowman described measured sixty-three feet by fifty-one feet and stood around five feet high, a substantial accumulation pointing to sustained use over a long period. The four sites together suggest this stretch of North Cork was well-frequented in prehistory, perhaps because the stream provided the reliable water supply that fulachta fiadh required. A second example sits roughly a hundred and ten metres to the north-east, close enough to raise the possibility that both served the same community, or at least the same favoured stretch of ground.