It is easy to miss, rising only half a metre above the surrounding ground, but its shape is deliberate and its origins are stranger than the casual eye might suppose.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, with County Cork alone holding one of the highest concentrations in the country. The basic principle is simple enough: stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it rapidly to a boil. The repeated heating and sudden cooling fractured the stones, and the resulting debris, fire-cracked rock mixed with charcoal and ash, was piled to the sides of the trough over time. That accumulated waste is what we see today. The mound at Coolroe Beg measures roughly sixteen metres wide and nearly twenty metres long, its horseshoe shape opening to the east with a gap of just over six metres, the hollow interior once marking where the trough would have sat. Most fulachta fiadh date to the Bronze Age, broadly between 1500 and 500 BC, though some are earlier, and their precise function has long been debated. Cooking is the most widely accepted explanation, though brewing, bathing, and textile processing have all been proposed by archaeologists over the decades.