A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up around a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a nearby fire. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, usually close to water, and this example in Banard sits at the foot of a south-facing slope, on the edge of a marshy area, which is precisely the kind of waterlogged ground these sites favour.

The site was first recorded in the 1940s through the Schools Manuscript collection, a nationwide project in which schoolchildren gathered local folklore and place knowledge, including details of old monuments and landscape features. The entry for Kerry noted the fulacht fia on James Lucy's land in the field known as 'Mach'. When the site was revisited more recently, the landowner was able to point out the general location of a mound of burnt material, the characteristic dark, scorched debris that marks where a fulacht fia once functioned. But nothing is visible above ground now. The mound has either been levelled, absorbed back into the pasture, or simply grassed over to the point of invisibility.

What lingers is the setting. The marshy hollow at the base of the slope looks southwest toward the Paps of Dana, the two rounded hills in east Kerry whose outline, suggestive of a recumbent figure, gave them their name and made them a landmark of some significance in early Irish mythology. Whether the people who used this cooking site had any particular regard for that view is unknowable, but it is the kind of alignment that makes you pause.