Fulachta fiadh, the plural form, are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland: essentially outdoor cooking places, typically Bronze Age in origin, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. The horseshoe shape is characteristic, formed by the gradual accumulation of discarded, fire-shattered stone around the trough's edge. By the mid-1970s, all four at Killoughane were still visible. They are not visible now.

Sometime after the mid-1970s, the land was deep-ploughed, and no apparent trace of the sites survives above ground. Before one of the mounds was levelled, something unexpected came out of it: a metal object described as boat-shaped. Who found it, exactly when, and where it went afterwards are all unknown. Its present provenance remains unaccounted for. That a metal artefact of any kind was associated with one of these sites is itself noteworthy, since fulachta fiadh are more commonly defined by stone and water than by metalwork. Whether it had any original connection to the cooking site, or arrived there by other means across the intervening centuries, is a question that can no longer be answered at Killoughane, where the ground has long since been turned over and smoothed flat.