On a south-facing slope at Burgatia in County Cork, a spread of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-darkened soil was observed in a ploughed field in 2002, covering an area of roughly ten metres by ten metres. By 2005, when someone went to look again, the field had returned to pasture and the material could no longer be found. The site exists, for now, only on paper.

What had been there, briefly visible through the turned earth, was a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric feature found widely across Ireland and Britain. These sites are typically associated with the Bronze Age, and consist of the accumulated debris from repeated cycles of heating stones in a fire and plunging them into water, probably for cooking, bathing, or industrial processes. The stones crack and fracture under the thermal stress, becoming useless for further heating, and over time they build up into a mound mixed with ash and burnt organic material. The Burgatia example was noted by Mary Sleeman in 2002, when ploughing had exposed the characteristic spread of fractured stone and blackened soil. It was a fleeting window. When inspectors returned three years later, the grass had grown back over whatever remained, and the surface gave nothing away.