But this is what remains of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically beside water and on the margins of usable land, exactly the kind of location this one occupies, caught between bog to the east and rising pasture to the west.

The site at Baysrath only came to light in 2007, when it was excavated ahead of the N9/N10 road scheme running between Kilcullen and Waterford. By that point it had been heavily truncated, reduced to a spread roughly fifteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south, surviving to a depth of just twenty centimetres. Beneath the mound, archaeologists found a single pit, about sixty centimetres across and thirty-six centimetres deep. Charcoal recovered from that pit was radiocarbon dated to between 1207 and 979 cal BC, placing activity here firmly in the Late Bronze Age. The method works like this: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough or pit, bringing the water rapidly to the boil. The cracked, spent stones were raked aside and accumulated into the characteristic mound. A second burnt mound was excavated approximately fifty metres to the southwest, suggesting this stretch of marginal ground saw repeated use over time, or by different groups, during the same broad period.