It is easy to walk past without a second thought, but what you are looking at is almost certainly the flattened remains of a fulacht fiadh, or burnt mound, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland and Britain.

Fulachtaí fiadh typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, the discarded residue of a process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Over repeated use, the shattered stones accumulated into a mound. The one at Clogherane survived long enough to be remembered locally, but was levelled during land reclamation, leaving only the scorched spread in the soil as evidence of its presence. Twenty metres to the north, a second burnt spread survives in a similar condition, suggesting this part of the Knockowen hillside saw repeated or sustained activity at some point in the prehistoric past, possibly during the Bronze Age, when such sites were most commonly in use across Ireland.