In a ploughed field on a west-facing slope in County Waterford, the ground gives away something ancient: an oval spread of burnt and broken stone, roughly 15.5 metres east to west and 11 metres north to south. It is easy to walk past such things without a second thought, but this scatter of shattered rock is the physical signature of a cooking tradition that endured across Ireland for thousands of years.

Sites like this are known as burnt mounds, the accumulated debris of repeated high-temperature heating. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a method of cooking or processing that left behind a characteristic mound of cracked, fire-reddened stone. What makes the Ballynabola site particularly interesting is its proximity to a fulacht fiadh, the Irish term for a burnt mound complex that typically includes the trough, a hearth, and the mound of spent stone itself, located approximately 30 metres to the north-east. The two features may represent different episodes of activity at the same repeatedly used location, or they may simply reflect how attractive this particular slope, perhaps for its drainage or its access to water, was to prehistoric communities over a long period.