Beneath the grass, or perhaps entirely dissolved into the soil, lies what was once recorded as a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The classic form consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, the debris from a repeated process of heating rocks in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Tens of thousands of these sites survive across the island, most of them dating to the Bronze Age, and yet this one in Ballymaquirk has effectively vanished.

By 1938, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map series, the site was still present and visible enough to be recorded as a mound, sitting roughly ten metres west of a nearby stream. That proximity to water is entirely typical; a reliable water source was essential to how these sites functioned. At some point between that mid-twentieth-century survey and more recent inspection, the mound disappeared from the surface entirely, leaving no visible trace. Whether it was levelled by agricultural activity, gradually spread by ploughing, or simply eroded into the surrounding ground is not recorded.