It measures roughly eleven metres north to south and twelve metres east to west, rising to less than a metre in height, with a roughly two-metre-wide opening facing west. What makes it arresting, once you know what you are looking at, is that it was built by people cooking, probably thousands of years ago, and then apparently raided in more recent times for the very material that gives it its shape.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in very large numbers across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in origin. The usual method involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and using the resulting heat to cook meat. The cracked, burnt stones that accumulated around the trough over repeated use eventually formed the distinctive horseshoe-shaped mounds we see today. The one at Kilnahulla More is irregular rather than neatly horseshoe-shaped, and local information adds an intriguing detail: at some point, burnt material was removed from the mound and used to infill nearby marshy ground, which explains both its irregular outline and its relatively modest height. It is one of a cluster of five such sites in the immediate area, suggesting this corner of north Cork saw sustained activity over a considerable period.