The one at Curramore in County Cork is a quiet example of a type that has puzzled researchers for generations. A fulacht fia typically survives as a low, horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone, usually found near a water source, and dating in most cases to the Bronze Age. The mound is the debris left behind after repeated cycles of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil.

What the troughs were actually used for remains genuinely contested. The most widely cited theory is that they served as cooking places, and experiments have shown that this method works efficiently enough to prepare large cuts of meat. But other proposals have been put forward over the years, including uses related to textile processing, bathing, or brewing. No single explanation has satisfied everyone, which gives sites like the one at Curramore an air of productive uncertainty. Cork is particularly dense with these monuments, a reflection of both the county's Bronze Age activity and the survival of low, damp ground where the characteristic mounds tend to preserve well.