The one at Cordal, in the Kerry uplands, is typical in its quiet anonymity: a low, horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, dark soil, and charcoal, sitting close to a water source and easy to walk past without a second glance.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is essentially the debris left behind by a prehistoric cooking method. The process involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The stones crack under the repeated thermal stress and are discarded after use, building up over time into the characteristic mound shape that survives today. Most fulachta fia in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, broadly between 2000 and 500 BC, though some examples span earlier and later periods. Kerry has a particularly dense distribution of them, and the Cordal area, lying inland between the Stacks Mountains and the Mullaghareirk range, sits within a landscape that saw sustained prehistoric activity. The function of these sites has been debated at length; cooking is the most widely accepted explanation, but brewing, textile processing, and bathing have all been proposed, and the structures may have served different purposes at different times or places.