When the land is under pasture, there is nothing to see. But when a plough cuts through the soil along the northern bank of a small east-west stream, it turns up something older: broken and burnt stones sitting in black clay, the trace of a prehistoric cooking site that otherwise remains completely invisible to the surface world.

What the plough is disturbing belongs to a class of monument known as a burnt mound, one of the most common yet least conspicuous prehistoric site types in Ireland. The general principle is straightforward: stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, most likely for cooking. Over time, the shattered, fire-cracked stones accumulated into a mound, typically crescentic in shape, often positioned close to a reliable water source. The stream here would have supplied exactly that. A second burnt mound of the same type lies roughly 150 metres to the east, suggesting that this stretch of the Ballymore landscape saw repeated or prolonged use during prehistory, though the precise period remains unspecified in what is known about the site. These monuments cluster most commonly in the Bronze Age, though they appear across a wide span of time.

Because the site only becomes apparent when the field is ploughed, any physical encounter with it is a matter of agricultural timing and a certain amount of luck. The black clay matrix in which the stones sit is itself characteristic of these features, the result of organic material accumulating around the discarded, waterlogged debris of repeated use.