What had survived for perhaps three or four thousand years was gone by 1995, and with it most of the physical evidence for one of the more intriguing recurring features of the Irish archaeological landscape.

A fulacht fia, loosely translated as a burnt mound, is a type of site found in the hundreds across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in origin and believed to have functioned as an outdoor cooking or heating facility. The method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point. Over repeated use, the stones shatter and become useless, and the discarded fragments accumulate into the characteristic low, dark mound of burnt and fire-cracked material. Before it was destroyed, the Doonasleen example was a roughly circular mound measuring twelve metres across in both directions and standing about a metre high, sitting in pasture to the east of a well. When the mound was levelled, four timber planks came to light, the longest reaching a maximum of around two and a half metres. Arranged in a rectangle or square, they are thought to represent the remains of the wooden trough at the heart of the site, the vessel into which those heated stones were dropped. The planks were removed, their current whereabouts unrecorded in what survives of the site's documentation.

What makes this particular site quietly affecting is the completeness of its disappearance. The mound is gone, the trough timbers taken away, and the field has returned to ordinary agricultural use. The well to the west remains, though it now sits beside a landscape that gives no surface indication of what once lay beside it.