When workers cut through the marshy ground at Cloonbannin in north Cork, they exposed something that had been sitting undisturbed in the wet earth for thousands of years: a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is thought to be a Bronze Age cooking or food-processing site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. The cracked and shattered stones were then discarded into a mound nearby, and it is these spreads of fire-reddened, fragmented stone that survive so well in waterlogged ground. At Cloonbannin, the drain running northwest to southeast through the site revealed a layer of burnt material some 0.8 metres deep on both sides of the cut. More remarkably, the drain also exposed part of the wooden trough itself: a section of the base and the eastern side, with the exposed base measuring roughly 0.23 metres in length and 0.28 metres in width, and the side panel about 0.1 metres wide. Wooden components of fulachta fia rarely survive, and even a partial fragment is an uncommon find, preserved here only because the boggy, anaerobic conditions around the site sealed it from decay.