It measures roughly 8.5 metres by 7.5 metres and rises no more than 38 centimetres above the surrounding ground. Nothing about it announces itself. But the material it is made of, burnt and fire-cracked stone, tells a specific story that goes back thousands of years.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, after which meat could be cooked. The shattered, heat-stressed stones were discarded into a mound nearby, which is precisely what survives here. What makes the Knockballymartin site more than a routine example is its setting within a cluster. A second fulacht fia lies roughly 25 metres to the north, on the opposite bank of the same stream, and together these two form part of a group of five such sites in close proximity. The repeated use of the same stretch of water, with monuments accumulating on both banks, suggests this location was returned to over time, perhaps across generations, rather than visited once and abandoned.