A Bronze Age cooking site that had been recorded on an Ordnance Survey map as recently as 1940 had, within a few decades, effectively vanished from the surface of a hillside in County Wexford, leaving behind only a loose scatter of field stones where a substantial mound had once stood.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient outdoor cooking place found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a burnt mound of fire-cracked stones and dark, charcoal-stained soil beside a water source. The heat from the stones, dropped into a water-filled trough, would have brought liquid to boiling point. The example on the south-east-facing slope of Slievebaun Hill near Kilmichael was noted in 1939 as a circular mound roughly ten metres across and up to a metre high, composed of charred stones and black soil, with a slight hollow or indentation at its north-eastern side. A stream running broadly west-north-west to east-south-east lay just to the north, precisely the kind of water supply these sites required. It appeared on the 1940 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, but when the site was examined again in 1987, the mound itself had gone. What the intervening decades removed, whether through agricultural clearance or simple dispersal, is not recorded.

What makes this stretch of hillside particularly interesting is that it does not stand alone. Two further fulachtaí fia sit close by along the same stream, one approximately forty metres to the west-north-west and another around a hundred metres to the south-east. A standing stone also lies in that south-easterly direction. The concentration suggests this was not a casually chosen spot but part of a broader pattern of prehistoric activity on the slopes around Slievebaun.