It looks, at first glance, like not very much at all, a patch of scrubland stripped of vegetation. What it represents, however, is a Bronze Age cooking site of a type known in Irish archaeology as a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in the country and yet still not entirely understood.

A fulacht fia typically consists of a mound of heat-shattered stone, accumulated over repeated use, beside a trough and a water source. The method, broadly reconstructed from excavated examples, involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, then using that water to cook meat. The cracked, spent stones were raked out and piled to the side, which is how the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound forms over time. The Coolcoulaghta example sits beside a stream, which fits the pattern precisely. It was discovered relatively recently, but the land reclamation that brought it to light also levelled it, leaving only the spread of burnt material where a mound once stood.