No mound, no hollow, no scatter of stones breaks the surface. The only clue to its existence comes from the plough, which periodically turns up a spread of burnt material from the soil below, a dark smear of charred stone and ash that briefly interrupts the ordinary business of farming before being turned under again.

The site belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking place found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, with Cork particularly well-represented. The typical form consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a timber-lined trough. The working method, as archaeologists understand it, involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil, which would then be used to cook meat. Over time, the shattered, spent stones accumulated into the characteristic mound. At Hoddersfield, whatever mound may once have existed has long since been levelled by cultivation, leaving only the buried deposit of burnt material to indicate that the site was ever there at all. The information about it comes not from excavation or formal survey on the ground, but from local knowledge, passed on by people who had noticed what the plough brought up.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see here. The site sits somewhere within farmland, unmarked and invisible, known only because the earth occasionally gives it away.