A fulacht fia is a type of ancient outdoor cooking place, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stones beside a water-filled trough, in which heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The mound at Carrigcleena was recorded on the 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, at which point it still rose from open scrubland. It has since been buried under quarry rubble and lost to any practical investigation.

What makes the site linger in the memory, however, is not its current state but an account of what was found there more than 170 years ago. In 1853, the South Munster Antiquarian Society, led by the Cork antiquary John Windele, investigated what is believed to be this same site. What they uncovered was a wooden trough, built from eight oak planks, four forming the sides and ends and four the bottom. It measured six feet long, four feet wide, and two feet deep. There were no nails; the planks were held together by a groove cut at each end of the side pieces, into which the end planks slotted. A rough rounded wooden bar ran through the middle of the base and down into the marl beneath. The outer surfaces of the oak, the account notes, were nearly as rough as when the trees were first felled, consistent with the kind of tooling that stone axes would produce. The image it conjures is quietly precise: a watertight vessel, jointed without metal, constructed from unsawn oak, and buried in the ground for what may have been several thousand years before Windele's party came across it.