Somewhere beneath a pasture on a hilltop in Kilbarry, County Waterford, lies a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland, that has not been visible at ground level for as long as anyone has recorded it. There is no mound to speak of, no earthwork to catch the eye, nothing to distinguish this particular patch of grass from the surrounding farmland. The site exists, essentially, as an absence.

A fulacht fiadh, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the surviving remains of an outdoor cooking place used predominantly during the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a trough, often timber-lined, that was filled with water, and a hearth where stones were heated before being dropped into the water to bring it to a boil. The heat-shattered stones accumulate over time into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound, often stained dark by burning. In the case of the Kilbarry site, the feature was first formally noted in the 1950s, when it was recorded in a National Museum of Ireland file, but even then the physical evidence at ground level was apparently negligible. What remains is buried, its presence inferred from earlier observation rather than anything a walker crossing the hill today would be likely to notice.