That accidental slice, dug east to west to a depth of just forty centimetres during conifer planting, exposed the characteristic dark, fire-cracked material inside, confirming what the mound's shape and waterside position had quietly suggested all along: this is a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a Bronze Age cooking or heating site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped or circular mound of shattered, fire-reddened stones piled beside a stream or natural water source. The working method, as understood from excavated examples, involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, then discarding the cracked, spent stones into the mound alongside. At Knockcurraghbola the mound is notably large, measuring roughly sixteen metres north to south and twenty metres east to west, rising about a metre above the surrounding ground. No trough has been identified at the surface, which is not unusual; timber troughs decay, and stone-lined ones can be buried or disturbed. The drainage ditch that revealed the monument also, inevitably, cut through its centre. The site sits in good company on this upland stretch, with a possible two-stone row and a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument characteristic of the later Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age, recorded a short distance to the north-west, suggesting the area saw repeated use across a long prehistoric period.