At Rooves Beg in County Cork, a fulacht fia sits in pasture on the western bank of a stream, leaving no visible mark on the ground whatsoever. It is, in the most literal sense, a site that has disappeared.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after repeated use. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a technique used across Ireland from the Bronze Age onward. At Rooves Beg, even that modest trace is gone. The site was likely disturbed or destroyed during drainage works, the kind of agricultural improvement that reshaped Irish wetlands and streamsides for generations, often unknowingly cutting through the very deposits that archaeologists would later wish to study. What survives is essentially a coordinate and a note. Roughly sixty metres to the north-west, a second fulacht fia has been recorded, which at least suggests the area was a focus of repeated prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated episode.