It measures roughly 28 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, and to an untrained eye it would read as nothing more than a slight rise in waterlogged ground. In fact it is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically dated to the Bronze Age. The characteristic shape, a horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and dark, charred earth, forms over centuries of repeated use, as heated stones were dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, then discarded in a pile once they had shattered from the thermal shock.

The site at Mountnorth is a quiet example of a monument type that is anything but rare in Cork, yet no less worth pausing over for that. What is notable here is how faint it has become. The mound of burnt material is described as barely perceptible, which points to either the softening effect of the marshy ground absorbing and settling the debris over millennia, or simply the slow work of agricultural land use pressing the archaeology down. The waterlogged setting is consistent with how these sites tend to cluster, close to streams, springs, or boggy hollows, where a reliable water supply was the essential ingredient for whatever activity, cooking, bathing, textile processing, or otherwise, was taking place.