Together, though, they mark the site of repeated prehistoric activity of a very particular kind. The one recorded here measures roughly eight metres along its longer axis and six across, an oval dark stain in the soil that has been turned over by tillage but not entirely erased.

Each of these spreads is a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking or hot-water site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, with several thousand recorded nationwide. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the ground near a water source, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of those same stones once they had cracked and shattered from repeated heating and quenching. That mound of fire-shattered stone and charcoal is what survives, and what gives the site its characteristic dark, burnt appearance. The stream immediately to the west of this field would have been the practical reason for choosing the location; proximity to fresh water was not incidental but essential to how these sites functioned. What makes Kilpatrick quietly unusual is the density: five fulachta fiadh in a single field suggests this particular spot was returned to repeatedly, or that a group of them were used in some related way, perhaps seasonally, perhaps by different groups over a long span of time.