Yet that is precisely what survives at Monagoun in County Cork, where a spread of burnt material on a west-facing slope marks the location of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet most quietly baffling monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape.

A fulacht fia is, in essence, a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone built up around a trough that was dug into the ground and lined to hold water. Stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil, a process efficient enough to cook large joints of meat. These sites appear in their thousands across Ireland, generally dating to the Bronze Age, though some have produced dates ranging from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period. What makes them curious is the sheer concentration of effort they represent: enormous quantities of stone, repeatedly heated and discarded, accumulating over what must have been extended or repeated use. The Monagoun example, sitting on a west-facing slope, is now largely visible only as that characteristic spread of darkened, heat-shattered material turned up by agricultural ploughing, the mound itself long since dispersed by centuries of cultivation.