Somewhere beneath or beside an unremarkable patch of North Cork ground, a fulacht fia, an ancient cooking site typically dated to the Bronze Age, has been levelled out of existence. These monuments are among the most common prehistoric features in the Irish landscape: low horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, built up over generations of use around a trough into which water was heated by dropping in stones from a fire. At Dromdeer, even that modest profile is gone.

According to local information, the mound of burnt material that once marked the site was levelled at some point in the past. No visible surface trace now remains. The fulacht fia would originally have presented as a dark, spread mound, the discoloured soil and shattered stone being the accumulated debris of repeated episodes of cooking or perhaps industrial heating, over what archaeologists generally estimate to have been centuries of intermittent use. The precise circumstances of its levelling at Dromdeer are unrecorded; the likelihood is that agricultural improvement, whether ploughing, drainage, or land clearance, gradually erased what had survived for perhaps three thousand years.