A fulacht fia, the term for a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, once occupied this boggy patch of ground. These monuments typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, accumulated over repeated episodes of heating stones and plunging them into a water-filled trough to cook meat or, as some researchers now argue, to brew, bathe, or process textiles. At Ballydaly, even that characteristic mound is gone.

When a researcher named Broker visited in 1937, he recorded the site as a heap roughly forty feet in diameter and flush with the ground, already low and inconspicuous. By the 1950s, according to local account, it had been levelled entirely. What remains is a spread of burnt material across the marshy corner of the field, with some of that scorched debris visible on top of an adjacent field fence, suggesting the material was disturbed and displaced rather than simply eroded away. The site does not stand alone in the landscape: another fulacht fia lies approximately a hundred metres to the north-west, a reminder that these sites often cluster in low-lying, water-retentive ground where the necessary supply for the cooking trough was close at hand.