At Curragh in County Cork, one such site survives in what is now reclaimed pasture, though the ground beneath was once marshy, exactly the kind of wet, low-lying terrain these features seem almost to seek out.

A fulacht fia, to use the singular form, is generally understood as a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough or pit. The stones, once shattered by repeated heating and quenching, were discarded in a mound nearby. That characteristic spread of burnt and broken stone is what archaeologists look for, and at Curragh it has been noted in the reclaimed ground. The association with formerly marshy conditions is entirely typical. Wet ground provided ready access to water, and the soft earth would have made it easier to dig and line the necessary trough. Whether the sites were used purely for cooking, or had other functions, including textile processing or bathing, remains a subject of debate among archaeologists, but the physical signature, that dark spread of fire-cracked material, is consistent across hundreds of examples throughout Ireland.