To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than disturbed earth, but the dark, heat-shattered stone marks the footprint of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape.

Fulachtaí fia, found in their thousands across Ireland, are the remains of ancient cooking or industrial sites, typically Bronze Age in date, consisting of a mound of burnt stone and charcoal built up beside a trough, often timber-lined, into which water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones. The stones fracture with repeated heating and cooling, accumulating over time into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive to this day. What exactly these sites were used for remains a matter of debate among archaeologists; cooking large quantities of meat is the traditional explanation, but experiments and analysis have also pointed to uses such as bathing, textile processing, or brewing. The Ballincurrig example sits modestly in agricultural land, its spread of burnt material still readable in the soil despite centuries of cultivation on the surrounding slope.