At Ballyleigh in County Cork, a fulacht fia, one of the low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone left behind by Bronze Age cooking or heating activity, was still visible enough in 1940 to be recorded on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Today, no surface trace remains.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, numbering in the thousands, and they cluster reliably near water sources. The Ballyleigh example was noted as lying adjacent to springs, which fits the pattern precisely. The typical fulacht fia worked by heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. Over repeated use, the stones cracked and became useless, accumulating around the trough as the distinctive burnt-mound spread. The springs at Ballyleigh would have made it an obvious and practical location for this kind of activity during the Bronze Age. That the mound was still legible as a feature when mid-twentieth-century surveyors mapped it suggests it had survived reasonably intact for several millennia, only to disappear from view sometime in the decades since.