Roughly three metres across and just thirty centimetres high, with no sharp edges to its outline, it would be easy to walk past without a second thought. But the dark, scorched soil and fragments of angular stone visible where the mound has eroded give it away as a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of repeated prehistoric fire-setting and water-heating activity.

Burnt mounds of this kind are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, typically associated with the Bronze Age practice of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The cracked and shattered stones, useless for further heating, were then raked aside to form the characteristic horseshoe or oval mounds that survive across the Irish landscape. What makes the Ross site quietly remarkable is the density of related archaeology in its immediate vicinity. A fulacht fia, the general term for the trough-and-mound complex associated with this cooking or processing method, lies just six metres to the east. A second burnt mound sits roughly thirty metres to the north-east. And approximately twenty-five metres to the south-south-west there is a holy well, a site of a quite different character and period of use. Whether these features accumulated around the same reliable water source over generations, or represent a more concentrated episode of activity, is not recorded, but the spring-fed stream that still runs through the area offers an obvious explanation for why this particular patch of wet pasture drew people back repeatedly.