This one appeared briefly, then disappeared again beneath a field in Farran, County Cork, leaving almost no trace. When the ground was ploughed in 1997, a scatter of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-darkened soil became visible, the classic signature of a burnt mound. By 2000, with the field returned to pasture, the spread could no longer be found at all.

Burnt mounds are among the more enigmatic features of the Irish prehistoric landscape. They typically consist of mounds or spreads of fire-cracked stone and organic debris, the accumulated waste of a process involving the repeated heating of stones and their use to boil water, most likely for cooking, bathing, or some form of industrial activity. They are extremely common across Ireland and date predominantly to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though the precise function of any individual example is rarely easy to determine. What the Farran site offers is a slightly different kind of puzzle: not the question of what it was used for, but whether it still meaningfully exists as a locatable feature at all. The material, disturbed by ploughing in 1997, was simply not visible three years later once grass covered the ground again. Whether the deposit survives intact beneath the surface, was largely turned up and dispersed by the plough, or was ever substantial enough to survive in any coherent form, remains unknown.