At Killeens in County Cork, a fulacht fia, one of the horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and heat-shattered stone left behind by Bronze Age cooking or industrial activity, once sat in wet marshy ground on the eastern bank of a small stream. By the time anyone thought to document it formally, the process of erasure was already well advanced.

The site was recorded in 2000, passed on by Marion A. Dowd, at a point when the surrounding ground level had already been raised through the dumping of earth. No visible remains of the fulacht fia survived that assessment. The stream beside which it once sat had been diverted entirely. Fulachtaí fia, as a class of monument, are among the most numerous prehistoric features in Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age and interpreted as outdoor cooking sites where water was boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough. They tend to cluster near water sources and low-lying, damp ground, which made the marshy stream bank at Killeens a perfectly plausible location. It also made it vulnerable, since wet, marginal land is precisely the kind that gets filled, drained, and reshaped when agricultural or development pressures arrive.

What remains at Killeens is therefore a coordinate on a map and a brief note in the archaeological record, marking a place where something genuinely old once protruded from the ground before the ground itself was reorganised around it.