That is, in a sense, the point. Somewhere beneath an ordinary stretch of pasture at the base of a north-facing ridge in County Tipperary, there lies the remains of a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking sites found across Ireland, and it is completely invisible from above. No mound, no depression, no scatter of stone gives it away. The field has simply absorbed it.

A fulacht fia, at its most basic, is an ancient outdoor cooking place, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a hearth nearby, and a mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated from repeated heating and quenching. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, dating mainly from the Bronze Age, though their precise function is still debated, with proposals ranging from cooking meat to brewing or bathing. The Crehanagh example came to light not through any planned investigation but as an accidental consequence of a gas pipeline excavation in 1986, recorded under reference BW/18/2 and documented by Gowen in 1988. Without that engineering work cutting through the ground, it might never have been identified at all. The undulating terrain at the ridge's base, with its tendency to retain moisture, is exactly the kind of location where fulachta fiadh tend to cluster, low-lying and close to water or damp ground.