It is not much to look at from a distance, barely half a metre high, but what it represents is one of the more intriguing recurring features of the Irish Bronze Age landscape.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient cooking or heating site, typically consisting of a crescent or U-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones built up around a trough. The general interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled pit to bring the water to a boil, a method efficient enough to cook meat or, as some researchers have suggested, to serve other purposes such as bathing or textile processing. The example at Cooloorta is a well-proportioned specimen: the mound measures roughly 12.6 metres north to south and 10 metres east to west, with two arms of broadly similar width and height enclosing a subrectangular central area of about 2.4 by 1.2 metres. A slight outer scarp marks the open ESE side. The site sits in ground prone to flooding from Skaghard Lough to the north-east, which is typical of the type; fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water or in seasonally wet terrain, where a trough could be easily kept filled. The site was noted on Tim Robinson's map of the Burren, published in 1977. A later field wall running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west appears to cut across or overlie the western edge of the mound, a reminder that farming boundaries have been drawn and redrawn across these landscapes for centuries without much ceremony. Perhaps most striking is that a second fulacht fia lies only about 110 metres to the north-north-east, suggesting this corner of Cooloorta was a place of repeated or sustained activity rather than a single, isolated episode.