To most eyes it would read as nothing more than a dark patch in the grass, but it is the surviving trace of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland and particularly common in the boggy lowlands of Munster. The boggy ground immediately to the south of this site is no coincidence; water was essential to how these places worked.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is an outdoor cooking area used during the Bronze Age, though some examples span a considerable range of dates. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire until they were intensely hot, then dropping them into a water-filled trough, often timber-lined, to bring the water to boiling point. The stones, repeatedly cracked by the thermal shock, were then discarded into a mound nearby, and it is these distinctive spreads of shattered, fire-reddened stone that survive in the landscape. The Deerpark site fits this pattern well, sitting at the edge of boggy land where water would have been readily accessible. The spread here is notably elongated, around 42 metres in length, which suggests either sustained or repeated use over time, or the gradual accumulation of discarded material across a broad working area.