At Lackaroe in County Cork, one such site sits quietly on the southern bank of a stream, a kidney-shaped mound of burnt stone and charred material measuring eighteen metres long, fourteen and a half metres wide, and still standing about seven tenths of a metre high, its southeast-facing opening still readable in the landscape despite the encroaching vegetation.

A fulacht fia, the term used in early Irish literature, is essentially a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date. The working principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water to a boil. Over repeated use, the stones cracked and became useless, and were piled up around the trough. That accumulated debris is what survives today as the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound, the spent remains of hundreds or perhaps thousands of individual cooking episodes. The Lackaroe example is not an isolated one; it is part of a cluster of three fulachta fiadh in the immediate area, which suggests sustained activity in this particular stretch of rough grazing land over some period of time. The proximity to a stream is entirely typical, since a reliable water source was essential to the whole operation.