What it reveals, though, is the remnant of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of those same stones once they had been used and discarded. The process involved heating the stones in a fire and then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, cracking and shattering the stones in the process. It is this characteristic spread of fire-cracked, burnt stone that tends to survive in the ground long after everything else has gone. At Ballynatona, that spread sits on the hillside to the west of a small stream, the kind of reliable water source that fulachta fiadh were almost invariably placed beside. The burnt material shows up in cross-section within the drainage cut, which is often how these sites first come to attention: not through excavation or survey, but through the accidental exposure of centuries-old debris during routine agricultural work.