At Caherbirrane in County Cork, however, what rises gently from the ground is a fulacht fia, one of the most widespread and quietly puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape. These are the scorched remnants of Bronze Age cooking sites, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil, most likely for cooking meat. The burnt, shattered stone was repeatedly raked out and piled up over time, forming the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive in their thousands across Ireland.

The Caherbirrane example is roughly circular, measuring fourteen metres in length and sixteen metres in width, with a height of around one metre. An opening about 2.8 metres wide faces to the north-east, and traces of a central depression mark where the trough once sat. What makes the site particularly notable is a stream flowing in from the east, which bisects the mound itself. This is not unusual in principle, since fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water, the entire cooking process depending on a reliable source, but here the stream has cut directly through the accumulated burnt material, offering an accidental cross-section through centuries of prehistoric activity.