By 1986, three small mounds that had been clearly enough defined to appear on the 1939 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had vanished entirely from the surface of a level pasture field near Balkinstown in County Kildare. No earthwork, no hollow, no visible trace remained. What had been recorded cartographically as a cluster of closely associated features, lying parallel to and just south-west of a small stream, had been absorbed back into the farmland.

The mounds are thought to have been fulachtaí fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in very large numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The standard interpretation holds that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, with the cracked and shattered stones gradually accumulating into a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough. The association with running water is consistent here; the stream nearby would have been the obvious source. At Balkinstown, the three mounds sat close together, which is not unusual since fulachtaí fia are frequently found in loose groupings, though the reasons for clustering are not fully understood. The sites were assigned reference numbers under the Sites and Monuments Record, suggesting they were recognised as a distinct group rather than incidental features of the landscape.