To a casual eye it might pass for a natural rise in the ground, but its roughly semicircular shape and the dark, burnt material of which it is made tell a different story. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, and one of the most common yet least remarked-upon features of the Irish countryside.

Fulachtaí fia are typically Bronze Age in origin, dating broadly to somewhere between 1500 and 500 BC, though some are older. The standard interpretation is that they functioned as outdoor cooking places: a trough, usually timber-lined and sunk into the ground, was filled with water, and stones heated in a nearby fire were dropped in to bring the water to a boil. The shattered, heat-spent stones were then discarded to one side, accumulating over repeated use into the horseshoe or crescent-shaped mounds that survive today. The one at Ardskeagh measures eighteen metres on its northeast-to-southwest axis and fourteen metres across, making it a reasonably substantial example. Its setting in low-lying, marshy ground is entirely characteristic; sites like this are almost always found near a reliable water source, and wet ground was no obstacle when the whole operation depended on having plenty of it to hand.