To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than a slight rise in a wet field. What it actually represents is the accumulated debris of prehistoric cooking, a monument to a technology that was once commonplace across Ireland and is now recognised as one of the most distinctive features of the Bronze Age landscape.

A fulacht fia, plural fulachta fiadh, is essentially the burnt and discarded waste from a trough-based cooking method. The typical arrangement involved digging a pit near a water source, lining it to hold liquid, and heating water by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until food could be boiled. Once the stones shattered from repeated thermal stress, they were piled to one side, and over decades or centuries of use these dumps of blackened, fragmented stone accumulated into the low mounds that survive today. The marshy setting at Knockane is entirely typical: water was central to the whole process, and fulachta fiadh cluster reliably in low-lying, wet ground. What is less typical, and what gives this particular site its quiet interest, is that it is not isolated. It belongs to a group of six such monuments in the same area, gathered in close proximity in a way that raises questions about how intensively this spot was used, and by how many people, and over what span of time. Six separate mounds implies either a very long history of repeated activity or a community making considerable collective use of the landscape.