They are gone now, levelled by drainage operations, and what remains is modest: a scatter of charcoal and heat-shattered stones, the quiet signature of the northernmost mound. It is almost certainly all that survives of three fulachta fiadh, a class of monument so common across the Irish landscape that they are sometimes called the most numerous prehistoric site type in the country, yet so thoroughly destroyed or overlooked that most people have never heard of them.

A fulacht fia, in its simplest form, is a cooking place. The typical arrangement involves a trough, usually timber-lined or cut into the ground near a water source, into which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped to bring the water to a boil. The characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at intact sites is the accumulated dump of those fire-cracked, spent stones, built up over repeated use. The proximity of these three mounds to the river fits that pattern precisely: water close at hand, stones heated nearby, the whole operation repeated until the mound grew large enough to notice from a distance. The site at Baile Na Saor Íochtarach was recorded as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula, a survey that documented the remarkable density of prehistoric activity across that part of Kerry.

The drainage work that removed the mounds is a familiar story across Ireland, where land improvement schemes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries quietly erased thousands of such sites before their significance was widely understood. What the charcoal spread at the northernmost mound represents is a moment of use frozen in the ground, the residue of fires lit and stones dropped into water, probably during the Bronze Age, by people working close to a river that is still there.