To an untrained eye it might read as a slight rise in the ground, a quirk of the terrain. In fact it is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, and this particular example is one of three clustered together in the same area.

A fulacht fia, in its simplest form, is the debris left behind by repeated episodes of fire-cracking stones. The typical method involved heating rocks in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, probably for cooking meat. Over time the shattered, heat-spent stones were raked aside and accumulated into a mound, almost always taking on that distinctive horseshoe or kidney shape with an open end facing the original trough. Here at Knockastuckane, the mound measures sixteen metres north to south, just over ten and a half metres east to west, with its opening of three and a half metres facing roughly east-north-east. These sites cluster heavily in the Bronze Age, though the activity they represent is simple and practical enough that the form persisted across long periods. The grouping of three fulachta fiadh in close proximity at this location is itself of some interest, suggesting repeated or sustained use of the area rather than a single episode of prehistoric activity.