To the untrained eye it might read as nothing more than a low, kidney-shaped spread of cracked and fire-reddened stone mixed into dark, peaty soil. But these modest mounds, found in their thousands across Ireland, are the accumulated remains of a Bronze Age cooking method that was repeated over generations, possibly centuries, in the same spot.

The technique behind a burnt mound, known in Irish archaeological shorthand as a fulacht fiadh, was straightforward. Stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, usually timber-lined and sunk into the ground nearby, bringing the water rapidly to the boil. Food, most likely wrapped meat, was then cooked in the trough. The fractured, heat-spent stones were tossed aside after each use, and over time this discard heap built up into the characteristic mound that survives today. Most examples date to the Bronze Age, broadly between 1800 and 800 BC, though some were in use earlier or later. The site at Cappagh Beg is one among a dense scatter of such monuments recorded across Clare and the wider west of Ireland, where boggy, low-lying ground near water sources provided exactly the conditions these cooking places required.