Beneath the turf lies a mound of burnt and shattered stone, the characteristic residue of a fulacht fia, and the kind of site that rewards curiosity rather than spectacle.

A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking or processing site. The typical setup involved a trough, usually timber-lined and sunk into the ground, filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those stones, once spent, were raked aside and gradually accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive across Ireland in their thousands. The Pluckanes example appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1939, which suggests it was a recognisable feature of the ground even then. A trough or water source approximately thirty metres to the south-west was still present at the time of that mapping but has since dried out, a small detail that connects the visible mound to its original function as a working, water-dependent site.