On the north-east-facing slope of a ridge in Ballygambon, County Waterford, there is a site that exists more in cartographic memory than in any visible form on the ground. The 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks it as a fulacht fia, one of those low, horseshoe-shaped mounds found scattered across the Irish countryside, typically interpreted as Bronze Age cooking sites where water was boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough. Today, however, whatever earthwork or hollow once prompted that designation has been swallowed entirely by quarrying activity, leaving an overgrown pit in its place.

The tension between the map and the landscape is the most telling thing about this site. At some point between the 1927 survey and the present, the ground here was worked for stone or material, and whatever archaeological trace remained was lost in the process. Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, numbering in the thousands, yet individually they are often poorly understood, their precise dating and function still a matter of some debate. That this particular example was captured on a mid-twentieth-century map at all suggests it was once a recognisable feature, perhaps a distinctive mound with the characteristic burned and shattered stone that accumulates over generations of use. Now, none of that is accessible.