Roughly eleven metres on each side and only about sixty centimetres high, it looks, to the untrained eye, like an unremarkable rise in the landscape. What it actually represents is the accumulated waste of repeated prehistoric cooking, a kind of ancient kitchen midden built from cracked and fire-shattered stone.

The site is a fulacht fia, a class of monument found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying or waterlogged ground. The typical interpretation is that these were Bronze Age outdoor cooking sites, where water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, the cracked and spent stones then piled to the side over many uses. The flat-topped, roughly square profile here is fairly characteristic, as is the location close to running water. A stream runs immediately to the south of the mound, and a second lies roughly seventeen metres to the north, providing the ready water supply that these sites seem always to require. What makes Ballyready slightly unusual is its company: a second fulacht fia of the same type lies only about thirty-eight metres to the west, which raises quiet questions about how these sites were used, whether simultaneously, seasonally, or by different groups returning over generations to a favoured spot.