That is precisely what makes this place worth pausing over. Until 1981, a circular mound roughly twelve metres across and about a metre high rose from the ground here, the accumulated remains of a fulacht fia, one of the prehistoric cooking sites found in considerable numbers across Ireland. By the time anyone thought to record its dimensions, it had already been levelled.

Fulachtaí fia, the plural form, are generally understood as Bronze Age sites where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The stones, once shattered by repeated heating and quenching, were discarded in a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough, and it is this mound of darkened, burnt material that survives at most sites and gives the feature its characteristic form. At Coolvallanane Beg, a spread of burnt material remains in the soil, confirmation that the mound was genuine rather than a natural rise, but the physical structure itself is gone. Local information supplied the details of what stood here and when it was removed, which is itself a reminder of how much archaeological knowledge depends on people who simply noticed something before it disappeared.