Somewhere in a stretch of rough grazing in North Cork, a prehistoric cooking site once rose from the ground as a high circular mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone. By 1979, it had been levelled, leaving no visible surface trace. What had accumulated over perhaps three or four thousand years was cleared away within living memory.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient outdoor cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough or pit. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into water to bring it to a boil, which explains the characteristic blackened, burnt material that forms the mound over time. The site at Ballyboneill is probably one of two such monuments recorded in 1934 by a researcher named Bowman, who noted them on land then belonging to an E. Guerin. The pair of sites appear to have sat close enough together to be documented in the same field observation, which is not unusual; fulachta fiadh are sometimes found in clusters, possibly reflecting repeated use of a favoured location near water over generations.

Because the mound was levelled in 1979, there is nothing for a visitor to find on the ground today. The site's interest is largely archival, a reminder that the archaeological record of any given field depends as much on what has happened to it in the twentieth century as on what was built or used there in prehistory.