This one in Gortavehy, in mid Cork, offers nothing of the sort. The fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after repeated use, was levelled before 1936 according to local information, and today there is no visible surface trace whatsoever. What remains is, in a sense, purely cartographic: a grid reference, a field note, and the knowledge that something was once there.

Fulachtaí fia are found in their thousands across Ireland, generally dating to the Bronze Age, though some sites were used into the early medieval period. The working principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, leaving behind a characteristic spread of shattered, heat-stressed stone that survives long after the organic parts of the structure have rotted away. The Gortavehy example sat in rough grazing ground to the west of a stream, a setting typical of the type, since a reliable water source was essential to the process. More striking is its proximity to a second fulacht fia roughly 150 metres to the northeast, suggesting repeated or sustained prehistoric activity in this small area of the Cork countryside. Whether the two sites were contemporary, or represent use across different periods, is the kind of question the levelled mound can no longer help answer.