Somewhere beneath the conifer canopy on a south-east-facing valley slope in Tooreen, County Waterford, a Bronze Age cooking site lay quietly forgotten for the better part of a century. Local memory had preserved a reference to a large fulacht fia still visible in the 1930s, but the subsequent planting of commercial forest swallowed whatever remained above ground, and the site slipped out of record and out of reach.

A fulacht fia, in its simplest description, is a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a prehistoric cooking method in which water held in a trough was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The Tooreen example was rediscovered by Coillte managers E. Drohan and T. O'Donoghue, working alongside archaeologist E. Byrnes, whose combined attention brought the structure back into view. What they found is a horseshoe-shaped mound measuring 13.9 metres east to west and 9 metres north to south, rising from 0.35 metres at its western edge to a full metre at its eastern end. On the northern side sits a water-filled trough area of roughly 5 metres by 4 metres, which would originally have served as the receptacle for heating water. The mound itself is the characteristic by-product of that process: fire-cracked and thermally exhausted stones, discarded and built up over repeated use into a low crescent around the trough. The site sits on a valley slope with a mountain stream running roughly 90 metres to the south-east, the proximity to a reliable water source being, as is typical of such monuments, no accident. A kerb circle, a separate monument class marked by a ring of upright or recumbent stones, lies approximately 180 metres to the north, suggesting this small corner of Waterford was something more than incidentally occupied during prehistory.