In a hollow of pastureland at Knockaderry, overlooking a quiet north-south valley in County Waterford, six prehistoric cooking sites lie beneath the ground with no trace at the surface and no memory of them surviving in local tradition. That combination, a cluster of six, invisible and entirely forgotten, gives the site an oddly melancholy quality. The places are there, recorded and catalogued, yet for all practical purposes they have vanished.

What lies here are fulachta fiadh, a term used for the burnt mounds found across Ireland in their thousands, most dating to the Bronze Age. The typical fulacht fiadh consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal, the debris from a cooking method that involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They tend to cluster in low-lying, damp ground, which fits the hollow setting at Knockaderry well. These six were first noted in the 1950s from a National Museum of Ireland file, which suggests they came to official attention through fieldwork or correspondence of that era rather than through any surviving local awareness. By the time the site was formally described, there was already nothing to see at ground level and nobody nearby who could say what the humps in the field had once been, or even that there had been humps at all.