Beneath that ordinary-looking spread of turf lies a scatter of burnt stone and charred material, the signature remains of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally understood to have functioned as cooking places, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. Over repeated use, the stones shattered from thermal shock, and the resulting mounds of cracked, fire-reddened debris are what survive today, sometimes for three or four thousand years.

What makes the Laharan site quietly interesting is the evidence of what once surrounded it. A spring marked on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map immediately to the south-west of the mound has since been drained, erasing the water source that almost certainly gave the site its reason for being in the first place. The proximity of fresh water is a near-universal feature of fulachtaí fia, and the drainage works that removed the spring here appear to have reshaped the immediate landscape considerably. Local information suggests the mound itself pre-dated those drainage works, meaning it survived a transformation that destroyed one of its defining characteristics. A second fulacht fia lies roughly sixty metres to the north-west, hinting that this corner of Laharan was a place of repeated or sustained activity rather than an isolated episode.