But that scatter of reddened, heat-shattered rock is the signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape. These sites typically date from the Bronze Age and are generally interpreted as outdoor cooking places, where water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough until meat could be boiled. The stones, fractured by repeated heating and sudden cooling, were discarded into a mound around the trough, and it is these characteristic burnt spreads that survive in their thousands across Ireland.

The example at Two-Pot-House, County Cork, was recorded by Mary Sleeman, an archaeologist with Cork County Council, on 19th October 2011. She noted a spread of dark soil mixed with reddened, heat-shattered stones measuring approximately six metres north to south and nine metres east to west, giving some sense of the scale of activity that once took place here. The dark colouration of the soil is itself a clue, the result of organic material and charcoal accumulating over repeated use. Whether this site saw seasonal use over a few generations or intermittent activity across a much longer period is the kind of question that only excavation could begin to answer.