But this particular hump, measuring four metres long, two metres wide, and just under a metre and a half high, is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet quietly puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological record. Part of it has been absorbed into an unsurfaced trackway, which is itself a small irony: a route worn by more recent feet now resting on the remains of a feature that may be three or four thousand years old.

Fulachtaí fia (the plural form) are horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds built up from fire-cracked stone and charred material, the debris left behind after repeated cycles of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, typically in low-lying or marshy ground where water was readily available, and they date primarily to the Bronze Age, though some examples span into the early medieval period. What exactly they were used for remains a subject of genuine debate among archaeologists; cooking is the traditional explanation, but experimental work has raised the possibility that they served for brewing, hide-working, or even bathing. What makes this Cork example particularly notable is the proximity of a second fulacht fiadh lying just ten metres to the south-west, suggesting that whatever activity drew people to this patch of boggy ground, it was substantial or sustained enough to leave two separate accumulations of burnt stone side by side.