Beneath the turf, however, lies a scatter of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet most persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of shattered stone built up around a trough. The process involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled pit until the water boiled, an effective if labour-intensive way to cook meat. Thousands of these sites are recorded across Ireland, concentrated in low-lying and sometimes marshy ground, which is precisely the kind of terrain that later agricultural improvement, of the sort that turned Carragraigue's surrounds into productive pasture, would have gradually obscured. The site at Carragraigue fits this pattern closely: the land has been reclaimed, the mound reduced to a grass-covered spread, and the burnt material beneath is all that remains to mark a day, or a season, of prehistoric activity.