At Dromultan in County Kerry, one such site sits quietly in the landscape, carrying the traces of an activity that occupied Bronze Age communities for centuries. The typical form is a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and cracked stone, dark with charring, built up over repeated use beside a trough and a water source. What exactly they were used for has kept archaeologists arguing for generations.

The prevailing interpretation is that a fulacht fia functioned as a cooking site. The method was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water rapidly to the boil. Meat could be wrapped and submerged, or joints suspended in the hot water, cooking efficiently without direct flame. Experiments have shown the technique works remarkably well. The discarded, heat-shattered stones accumulated over time into the characteristic mound that survives today. Some researchers have proposed alternative uses, including textile dyeing, hide-working, or even bathing, and it is quite possible that a single site served more than one purpose across its working life. Most fulachtaí fia date to the Bronze Age, roughly between 1500 and 500 BC, though some were in use earlier or later.

The Dromultan example sits within a county that has an exceptionally dense concentration of prehistoric remains, a reflection both of Kerry's long settlement history and of the boggy, marginal ground that preserved so many sites from later agricultural disturbance. The waterlogged conditions that once made low-lying land difficult to farm are precisely the conditions that kept these monuments intact long enough to be recorded.