These prehistoric cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically survive as horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone beside a water source. The idea behind them is straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it to a boil. What remains at Codrum is rather less than a mound, rather less than a site in any meaningful sense. It is, in the plainest terms, gone.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1938 records it with the notation "fulacht fiadh (site of)", already using the qualifying phrase that signals something reduced or vanished, and placing it on the western side of a stream. By the time that cartographic notation was being studied seriously, the area had been covered over by a concrete yard. The site at Codrum is in that way a double disappearance: first the prehistoric structure itself, leaving only surface traces readable to the mapmakers of the 1930s, and then those traces too, subsumed into the practical geometry of a working yard.