It looks unremarkable at first, the kind of slight rise in a field that a passing walker might attribute to nothing in particular. But the black soil and burnt stones packed beneath the turf tell a different story, one that stretches back into prehistoric Ireland.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in the hundreds across the Irish countryside, most commonly dating from the Bronze Age. The term refers to a mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-dark earth, the accumulated debris of repeated heating. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a method used for cooking, and possibly for other purposes including textile processing or bathing. The trough itself, usually a timber- or stone-lined pit, is often found at the edge of the mound. At Clooneen, there is a circular depression roughly two metres across at the north-north-west edge of the mound, though whether this marks the original trough location or is simply the result of more recent disturbance has not been established. The mound itself is roughly circular, measuring about fifteen metres across and rising to around 0.8 metres at its north-east end. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water, and this one is no exception. Before modern land reclamation altered the local hydrology, the wet boggy ground to the south and south-east would have extended considerably closer to the mound, placing the site in direct proximity to the standing water it would have required.