That uncertainty is, in its own way, the point. A fulacht fia, the most common prehistoric monument type in Ireland, is typically a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone left behind by repeated episodes of water-heating, in which stones were made red-hot in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They are ancient, mundane, and surprisingly easy to miss, even when you are specifically looking for them.

This particular example, one of seven in the area registered as potentially extant, came to light not through any planned excavation but as a by-product of bureaucracy. In 2000, Michael Connolly, the County Archaeologist for Kerry County Council, was conducting an assessment across a forty square mile area north of Killarney in order to inform the selection of a road route. In the course of that work he identified the site and reported it accordingly. The problem, then and since, is that no visible surface trace has been confirmed at the coordinates recorded. The monument, if it survives at all, lies within an unplanted buffer zone hemmed in by post-and-wire fencing to the west and north, forestry on two sides, and a field boundary on the others. The ground inside that cordon has been left ungrazed and has grown into a dense tangle of ferns, briars, and scrub.

The site is not accessible to visitors, and the vegetation that has colonised the buffer zone since 2000 makes locating any mound within it extremely difficult even for specialists. What the record captures, then, is less a monument than a probability: an educated assessment that something prehistoric almost certainly lies in that overgrown pocket of land, quietly waiting beneath the ferns.