That, in a quiet way, is the point. Somewhere beneath reclaimed farmland in Co. Cork lies the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones beside a trough, usually timber-lined, that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping in stones from a fire. They appear in their thousands across the Irish landscape, most often in low-lying or boggy ground, and most date to the Bronze Age, though their exact purpose has been debated. Food preparation is the most widely accepted explanation, though brewing, hide-working, and bathing have all been proposed.

The Kilbane site was recorded as a mound on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1943, sitting in marshy ground of the kind these sites consistently favour. At some point after that survey was made, the surrounding land was reclaimed, and with that process any surface trace of the mound was lost. It survives now, if it survives at all, only below ground, its presence known almost entirely because a mid-twentieth century cartographer thought it worth marking.