It is roughly ten metres across and only half a metre high, a modest rise in the ground that gives little away. But beneath the grass lies a spread of burnt and shattered stone, the characteristic debris of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the accumulated spoil of a prehistoric cooking site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire until they were near-cracking point, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. The stones, fractured and blackened by repeated heating, were then raked out and discarded nearby, building up over time into the kind of horseshoe-shaped or circular mound seen at Deshure. This process was repeated across centuries, and possibly millennia, of use. The proximity to a stream is entirely typical; a reliable water source was essential, and the vast majority of burnt mounds in Ireland are found close to running water or boggy ground. These sites date most commonly to the Bronze Age, broadly speaking the period from around 2500 to 500 BC, though some have produced earlier or later dates. What exactly was being cooked, or whether cooking was even the primary purpose, remains a matter of debate among archaeologists, with proposals ranging from food preparation to textile processing to communal bathing.