At Carrigbrack in County Waterford, a low, heather-covered mound sits quietly at the foot of a slope, doing very little to announce what it once was. It is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically dated to the Bronze Age. The name translates roughly as "cooking pit of the deer", and the basic principle involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point. The broken, fire-cracked stones discarded after each use accumulated over time into the distinctive horseshoe or U-shaped mound that survives at sites like this one.

The Carrigbrack example measures 13.5 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 6 metres across, rising to a maximum height of one metre. It is open to the southeast, the characteristic shape left by the trough that once sat at the centre of the working area. A small pond or quarry lies adjacent to the mound, and the Coumduane Stream runs roughly east to west approximately 60 metres to the south, providing the ready water supply that these sites consistently required. The fulacht does not sit in isolation; it falls within a broader prehistoric landscape that includes a field system and a cairnfield, suggesting that this part of Waterford was worked and inhabited over a considerable period, with the cooking site forming one element of a larger pattern of use.