The example at Coolbane in County Cork is a good illustration of why: it sits quietly in pasture, partially levelled, its identity given away only by a spread of blackened, heat-shattered stone and a handful of low mounds that barely rise above the surrounding grass.

A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a trough for boiling water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it, with the discarded burnt stone accumulating over time into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound. At Coolbane, several of these mounds survive, none standing higher than 0.4 metres, surrounded by a spread of burnt material measuring roughly twelve metres north to south and ten metres east to west. The site appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, where it was recorded as a mound, suggesting it was still relatively intact at that point. It was also noted by Bowman in 1934, at that time on land belonging to a David Noonan. By the time of more recent inspection, the site had been partially levelled, and the area had become overgrown, giving it the slightly ambiguous appearance common to many low-lying earthwork monuments in agricultural land.