It measures sixteen metres long, twelve metres wide, and barely fifteen centimetres high, so unassuming that a passing walker might take it for a natural rise in the ground. What gives it away, at least from the air, is its colour: a dark soil mark, the residue of thousands of years of burning.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying, waterlogged ground near water sources. The name, loosely translated from Irish, is sometimes rendered as "deer roast" or "cooking pit of the wild animal", though the precise meaning has long been debated. The standard interpretation is that these sites were used for boiling large quantities of water, typically by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The burnt and shattered stones were then discarded to one side, building up over time into exactly the kind of low, crescent-shaped mound seen here. The dried-up stream beside this example is significant: such sites almost always cluster near water, which was integral to their function. The mound itself is composed of that characteristic burnt material, the blackened, heat-fractured stone that is the archaeological fingerprint of the fulacht fia wherever it appears in Ireland.