That is, in a sense, the point. Beneath a wet meadow at the base of a north-east facing ridge in County Tipperary lies a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, yet one that almost always goes unnoticed precisely because it offers so little to the eye. A fulacht fia is, at its simplest, an ancient cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground and a mound of heat-shattered stone nearby, created when heated rocks were dropped into water to bring it to boiling point. Thousands survive across Ireland, most of them dating to the Bronze Age, and many, like this one, leave no visible trace above the surface.

The Crehanagh example came to light not through archaeological fieldwork in the conventional sense, but as an incidental consequence of a gas pipeline excavation in 1986. That kind of accidental discovery is itself telling: much of what is known about fulachtaí fia has come from infrastructure projects cutting through apparently unremarkable ground. The excavation was recorded under reference number BW/18/5, and the findings were published by Gowen in 1988. The location, a low-lying and undulating stretch of ground with the lush, waterlogged quality that these sites seem consistently to favour, is typical. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water or in naturally damp ground, which would have made the practical business of filling a cooking trough considerably easier.