It is not. Beneath the turf lies a spread of burnt and shattered stone, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking site. The typical arrangement involves a trough dug into the ground, a nearby water source, and a mound of heat-cracked stone that accumulated as hot rocks were repeatedly dropped into water to bring it to the boil, then discarded once they fractured and lost their usefulness. The process is sometimes described as trough boiling, and experimental archaeology has shown it to be surprisingly efficient for cooking large quantities of meat. The monuments are found in their thousands across Ireland, generally dating to the Bronze Age, though some examples have yielded earlier or later dates. They are almost always found near water, which makes the proximity of the Ballynidon example to a well entirely typical. What appears to a passing eye as a slight irregularity in a field is, in fact, the accumulated waste of repeated communal activity carried out perhaps three or four thousand years ago.