They typically appear as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone, dark with fire residue, sitting close to a water source. One such monument lies in the townland of Dysert in County Clare, a quiet addition to the remarkable density of prehistoric activity that characterises this part of the west of Ireland.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking site, in use roughly between 1500 and 500 BC, though the precise purpose of individual examples has been debated by archaeologists for decades. The standard interpretation holds that animal hides or joints of meat were lowered into a water-filled trough, which was then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those stones, fractured by repeated heating and quenching, accumulated over generations of use into the distinctive mound that survives today. The townland name Dysert derives from the Irish díseart, meaning a hermitage or place of withdrawal, a word applied to early Christian retreat sites, which suggests the landscape around this fulacht fia has layers of occupation and use stretching across many centuries. County Clare alone contains hundreds of recorded fulachtaí fia, many of them clustered near seasonal wetlands and streams that have long since dried or shifted course.