One of them, a fulacht fiadh, sits just north of an east-west field boundary, measuring roughly six and a half metres by eight and a half metres and standing only twenty centimetres high. That modest profile is deceptive. What survives here is the remnant of a prehistoric cooking site, and the fact that it survives at all is something of a near miss.

A fulacht fiadh, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking mound, formed from the accumulated debris of a process in which stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. The trough at Ballingowan is still traceable: it measures four metres east to west and one metre north to south, opening to the west, with its base sitting forty centimetres below the current surface of the mound. Around it, the characteristic burnt and shattered stone that gives these sites their alternative name, burnt mound, is still visible. The boulder clay exposed at the top of the mound points to another kind of disturbance, more recent and more damaging. When the field was deep ploughed in 1997, the already degraded site was further disturbed, the sod turned and the upper layers disrupted. A survey of the Lee Valley area carried out by Michael Connolly in 1996 to 1997 recorded the site before that damage was done, noting even then that it was substantially destroyed. The ploughing only confirmed the trajectory.