They look, at first, like nothing more than a low grassy hump in a wet field. The example at Ballyre in County Cork is exactly that: an irregular mound of burnt material, roughly twelve metres long, ten metres wide, and just over half a metre high, sitting in marshland on the southern bank of a stream.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking or heating site. The typical arrangement involves a trough, usually timber-lined and filled with water, into which stones heated in a nearby fire were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The shattered, fire-cracked stones were then raked out and discarded, gradually accumulating into the horseshoe-shaped mound that survives today. At Ballyre, the waterlogged hollow at the centre of the mound is the likely location of the original trough, and it remains connected to the stream by a narrow gully, just under one and a half metres wide, running northwards. This channel would have allowed the trough to be fed or drained directly from the stream, a practical arrangement that reflects how carefully these sites were chosen. The bulk of the burnt and fractured stone has accumulated on the western side of the hollow, which may reflect the prevailing direction of work around the trough or simply how debris was cleared over repeated use.