It is a fulacht fia, one of thousands of such sites scattered across Ireland, and its modest profile belies a considerable age and a function that archaeologists spent decades debating.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a nearby hearth, and a mound of the burnt and shattered stones that accumulated over repeated use. The method was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, cooking meat or other food. The cracked, fire-damaged stones were useless afterwards and were simply raked aside, building up over time into the distinctive horseshoe shape that survives at sites like this one. The form is so consistent across the Irish landscape that the mound alone is usually enough to identify the site type. At Gortnaclogh, the mound is low, which suggests either a relatively brief period of use, or that the site has been partially levelled or compressed by centuries of agricultural activity on land that has since been brought back into pasture.