But in Ireland, a spread of burnt stones often signals a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in their thousands across the island, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, leaving behind the characteristic mound of shattered, heat-fractured rock that survives long after everything else has gone. The example at Coolaholloga, County Tipperary, is modest even by the standards of the type, measuring roughly five metres by seven metres, but it represents exactly the kind of ordinary, unremarkable prehistoric activity that rarely makes it into any account of the past.

The site came to light during fieldwalking carried out ahead of construction of the N52 Nenagh Bypass link road, work documented by Hughes and O'Brien in 1999. Fieldwalking, in archaeological terms, means systematically walking across exposed or ploughed ground and recording what turns up on the surface, a low-technology but surprisingly effective method of catching sites before machinery arrives. What the survey found was a spread of burnt stones, with at least two large boulders sitting at the edge of the scatter, possibly original components of the site rather than later intrusions. A second burnt spread lies approximately ninety metres to the north-east, suggesting that this particular stretch of the Tipperary landscape was used repeatedly, or that the area held some practical appeal, perhaps a reliable water source, that drew people back across generations.