Yet this modest trace, uncovered at Adamswood in County Limerick, is a fulacht fia, and its very slightness is part of what makes it interesting. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are the remains of prehistoric cooking or industrial activity, typically identified by burnt and fire-cracked stone, a trough for heating water, and the dark, charcoal-rich soil that builds up over years of repeated use. What survives at Adamswood is the minimum, just enough to confirm something was here.

The site came to light not through a dedicated excavation but during archaeological monitoring of the Croagh Sewerage Scheme, the kind of infrastructure project that, under Irish planning law, requires a qualified archaeologist to watch over groundworks in case something turns up. In this case, something did. Excavator Sarah McCutcheon, working under licence reference 02E1214, recorded the third of several distinct areas of interest on site. The remains measured 4 metres east to west and 5.6 metres across, with the burnt layer sitting directly on peat, suggesting a low-lying, possibly marshy setting of the sort that fulachta fiadh typically favour. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the excavations.ie database in August 2012.

Adamswood is not a site with visible surface remains or a car park nearby. It was identified during monitoring, which means it exists now primarily as a record rather than a place you can stand in and look at. For anyone curious about fulachta fiadh in general, the broader Limerick landscape contains many better-preserved examples, and the excavations.ie database, where this record sits under licence number 02E1214, is worth browsing for the sheer accumulation of quiet discoveries that road schemes and pipe trenches have turned up across the country over the past few decades. That archive, rather than the field itself, is where Adamswood now lives.