This one, in a patch of woodland at Ballydowny in County Kerry, offers nothing of the sort. There are no visible remains whatsoever, and yet the site is recorded as a possible fulacht fia, the class of monument found in extraordinary numbers across the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking place, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones left behind after repeated cycles of heating rocks and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Without that characteristic burnt-stone mound breaking the surface, Ballydowny asks a certain amount of faith from anyone taking it seriously.

What survives is not archaeology you can see but rather a set of natural conditions that would have made the spot attractive in the first place. Springs rise to the north-west and north-east of the site, feeding water downhill via a small north-south channel that bisects the area where the fulacht fia is thought to have existed. That channel drains in turn into a stream running along the northern edge of the woodland. The logic of the location is legible even if the monument itself is not: a reliable water source, ground that holds moisture, shelter from the surrounding trees. These are precisely the environmental signatures that tend to cluster around confirmed fulacht fia sites elsewhere in Ireland, which is presumably what prompted the classification here despite the absence of surface evidence.