That, in a way, is what makes it worth thinking about. Somewhere beneath a waterlogged field on a gentle south-westerly slope in County Tipperary lies a fulacht fia, one of Ireland's most common and most puzzling prehistoric monument types, completely levelled and invisible above ground. No mound, no earthwork, no marker of any kind remains.

A fulacht fia, in its typical form, is a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone, usually found beside a natural water source or in low-lying wet ground. They date predominantly to the Bronze Age and are thought to have functioned as outdoor cooking sites, where water was boiled by dropping heated stones directly into a trough or pit. The site at Carrigavisteal was identified and recorded during surveys carried out in connection with the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline in the 1980s, with the relevant report compiled by Cleary, Hurley and Twohig in 1987. It was noted there as a levelled example, meaning whatever mound once existed had already been destroyed, most likely through agricultural activity over the centuries. The field has since been reclaimed but remains very wet pasture, which is itself telling: the boggy, poorly drained ground that made this a practical spot for prehistoric cooking activity has not entirely disappeared, even if the monument built around it has.