It is easy to overlook, and that is precisely what makes it worth pausing over. What you are looking at is what archaeologists call a burnt spread, the flattened remnant of what was almost certainly once a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland and Britain.

The mound that once stood here was levelled during land reclamation works, a fate that has claimed countless such features across the Irish countryside. Fulacht fiadh sites typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated over repeated use, usually positioned near a water source. Stones would be heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, cooking meat or, as some researchers have argued, serving other purposes entirely. Once the mound is gone, only the spread of heat-shattered and discoloured stone remains as evidence. What survives at Clogherane is that residue, a six-by-six-metre concentration of burnt material preserved in the field surface after the original mound was cleared away. Notably, a second burnt spread lies approximately twenty metres to the south, suggesting that this part of the Knockowen hillside saw repeated or sustained activity at some point in prehistory.