It is kidney-shaped, roughly eight metres at its longest and just over a third of a metre high, and beneath that unassuming surface lies a mixture of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-darkened soil. That combination is the giveaway. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, and one of the more quietly telling remnants of everyday Bronze Age life.

Fulachtaí fia, as they are known in the plural, were essentially outdoor cooking installations. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The stones, cracked and split by repeated thermal shock, were raked aside after use, and over time those discarded heaps accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mounds that survive today. The two-metre opening on the south-western side of this particular example is consistent with that shape, suggesting the trough once sat within that hollow. Thousands of these sites are known across Ireland, with Cork among the counties most densely scattered with them, though the majority remain in fields just like this one, unmarked and largely unvisited.