The example at Cloonyclohassy in County Limerick is easy to overlook from a distance, sitting quietly in pasture on a north-north-east-facing hill slope, but step closer and the ground tells a more interesting story. What you are looking at is the accumulated debris of repeated ancient cooking, or possibly bathing or industrial activity, left behind in a characteristic D-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone.

A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially a prehistoric cooking site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, after which the cracked and blackened stones were discarded in a mound nearby. The Cloonyclohassy monument, compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the archaeological record in August 2011, measures 9.6 metres north to south and 13.3 metres east to west, rising to a height of roughly half a metre. A bank of burnt material extends out from the mound towards the west-south-west for 6.3 metres, reaching a height of 0.9 metres, suggesting repeated and substantial use over time. The location beside a marshy area to the west and north-west is entirely typical; proximity to a reliable water source was a practical necessity for whoever was using the site. What makes this particular spot more unusual is that a second fulacht fia sits just six metres to the south-east, suggesting this stretch of hillside saw repeated or concentrated activity.

The site sits immediately north of a field boundary in what is now ordinary farmland, so access depends on the goodwill of the landowner and a willingness to navigate working pasture. The marshy ground to the west can be soft underfoot, particularly outside the summer months, so suitable footwear is worth considering. The mound itself is subtle rather than dramatic, and visitors without some prior familiarity with what to look for may initially mistake it for a natural rise in the ground. The giveaway is the dark, stony composition of the material underfoot and the low but deliberate shape of the bank extending from the main mound.