A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is an ancient cooking or processing site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough or pit. The conventional interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, though what exactly was being cooked, or whether the structures served other purposes entirely, remains a matter of genuine scholarly debate.

These sites date primarily from the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some examples extend into the early medieval period. Ireland has an unusually dense concentration of them, with estimates running to several thousand recorded monuments. They tend to cluster near water sources, and the mounds themselves, built up from the discarded heat-shattered stone over repeated use, can survive for millennia simply because the material is not worth disturbing. The site at Knockatee sits within a Kerry landscape that already carries considerable layers of prehistoric activity, the county being particularly rich in megalithic remains, standing stones, and ring forts from successive periods of early settlement.