It does not look like much at first glance, but beneath that overgrown surface lies roughly thirteen and a half metres of burnt and heat-shattered stone, piled to about a metre in height. What it represents is one of the most common yet quietly enigmatic monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia (the plural is fulachtaí fia) is a prehistoric cooking site, typically found in low-lying or waterlogged ground near a water source. The standard interpretation is that people would heat stones in a nearby fire, then drop them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, using the pit to cook meat or process other materials. The stones, cracked and useless after repeated heating and sudden cooling, were discarded to the side, building up over time into the horseshoe-shaped or circular mounds that survive today. Most examples in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, broadly speaking the period from around 2500 to 500 BC, though some sites have produced earlier or later dates. The marshy setting at Currahaly is entirely typical; these sites seem almost deliberately placed where water would collect naturally. What makes this particular spot a little more notable is the presence of a second fulacht fia immediately to the north-west, the two monuments sitting close enough together to suggest repeated use of the same damp, resource-rich ground across what may have been a long period of time.