This one is different. In a field of rough grazing near Newcastle in mid Cork, on the western side of a drain, there sits a barely perceptible mound of burnt material, easy to walk past without a second thought. What it represents, though, is one of the most common and most quietly fascinating site types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia (the plural is fulachtaí fia) is a prehistoric cooking place, typically Bronze Age in date, identified by the distinctive horseshoe-shaped or spread mound of fire-cracked stones that accumulates around a timber-lined trough. The method was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to a boil, and used to cook meat. Over many episodes of use, the shattered, heat-spent stones were discarded into a mound nearby, which is precisely what survives. They are extraordinarily numerous in Ireland, particularly in Cork, and they tend to cluster in low-lying, wet ground near water, which accounts for the drain running alongside this one. What makes the Newcastle site particularly notable, in a quiet way, is that a second fulacht fia lies immediately to the east, the two monuments sitting in close proximity in the same stretch of rough pasture, suggesting this was a place people returned to repeatedly.