It is the kind of monument that blends almost invisibly into the landscape, easily mistaken for a natural rise in a field, yet it represents one of the most common prehistoric site types found across Ireland.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the remains of an ancient outdoor cooking site, typically dating to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some examples are older. The method was straightforward: a trough was dug into the ground, often lined with timber or stone, and filled with water. Stones were heated in a nearby fire and then dropped into the trough until the water boiled, at which point meat wrapped in straw could be submerged and cooked. Over time, the discarded, shattered stones built up into a distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound. Ireland has thousands of these sites, making them one of the defining traces of prehistoric domestic life in the country. The Catstown example is one of many recorded across County Kilkenny, a county whose river valleys and wet lowland soils provided exactly the kind of waterlogged ground these sites tend to favour.