It leaves no mark on the ground, no hump in the field, no sign that anything ever happened there. This is the nature of many fulachtaí fia, a class of prehistoric monument so common across Ireland that archaeologists sometimes joke the country is paved with them beneath its topsoil, yet individually they are easy to miss, easy to plough away, and surprisingly easy to forget.

A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an outdoor cooking place used during the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone accumulated beside a trough and a water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled pit to bring it to the boil, cooking meat or perhaps serving other purposes that archaeologists still debate. The proximity to a stream at Gortnahown fits this pattern precisely. What makes this particular site slightly melancholy rather than merely unremarkable is that it was still visible as a mound on an Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1935, which means it existed as a recognisable feature of the landscape within living memory of people alive today, and has since vanished. Whether it was levelled by agricultural work or simply subsumed by the gradual smoothing of the land, the record does not say. What remains is a map reference, a grid coordinate, and the knowledge that something was once there.