The fulacht fia at Killany, in County Cork, offers none of that. Straddling a stream in open pasture, it survives only as a faint chemical memory, a staining of burnt material along the eastern bank of the watercourse and in the streambed itself, with no visible surface trace remaining on the western bank where the main activity once took place.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, typically dated to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some have yielded earlier or later dates. The name, loosely translated as "cooking place of the deer," points to the most widely accepted interpretation of their function: a trough, usually timber-lined or cut into the ground, filled with water from a nearby source, then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The cooked stones were discarded into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened, shattered rock and charcoal that typically surrounds these sites, which is exactly what a passerby would normally notice first. That the Killany example has lost even this signature shape makes it an unusually ghost-like specimen. What survives does so because the stream itself preserved the evidence, carrying those traces of burnt material into its bed, where they were protected from the agricultural activity that likely flattened the mound above. The proximity to a group of springs is entirely characteristic; reliable, clean water was a practical requirement for these sites, and their builders consistently chose spots where it was close at hand.