The one at Ballard in County Clare is a quiet example of a type that appears almost everywhere you look once you know what to look for: a low, horseshoe-shaped mound, typically of burnt and shattered stone, curving around the remains of a trough that was once filled with water. The name is often translated loosely as "wild deer cooking place", though what exactly went on at these sites has been debated for generations.

The broad consensus is that fulachtaí fia date mainly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, and that they functioned as outdoor cooking sites. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough, typically a wooden or stone-lined pit sunk into the ground, until the water boiled. The cracked and useless stones were then piled to the side, and over centuries of repeated use those discarded heaps built up into the characteristic mound shapes still visible today. Some researchers have proposed additional uses, including sweat houses or textile processing, though cooking remains the most widely accepted explanation. Clare is well represented by these monuments, sitting as it does in a landscape that would have supported substantial Bronze Age activity along its wetlands and waterways, where the damp ground conditions that fulachtaí fia seem to favour are common.