It looks, at a glance, like an unremarkable rise in the land, but its distinctive horseshoe form gives it away. This is a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking site found in their hundreds across the Irish countryside, typically beside a water source and in damp, low-lying terrain.

The mechanics of a fulacht fia are straightforward once explained. A trough was dug into the ground and lined, often with wood or stone, then filled with water. Stones were heated in a nearby fire and dropped into the trough until the water boiled, at which point meat could be cooked. The crescent or horseshoe-shaped mound surrounding the trough is made up of the accumulated fire-cracked stones, discarded after each use because repeated heating renders them too fragile to hold heat effectively. At An Bhinn Bhán, that mound measures roughly ten metres north to south and nine and a half metres east to west, rising to an average of about half a metre. A gap of just over two and a half metres opens at the west-south-west, and the hollow at the centre, where the trough would have sat, measures approximately two and a half by five metres. The stony fill of the mound is close to the surface and detectable even by probing the ground through the grass.

The site sits in characteristically soggy ground beside a stream, which is exactly where these monuments tend to appear. Its preservation is notably good, the mound retaining a clear profile and the central hollow still legible in the landscape. The surrounding rushes and the proximity to flowing water give the place something of the atmosphere that its prehistoric users would have known.