Somewhere in the boggy ground east of a pond in County Cork lies a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking sites that are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, and yet this one has been effectively erased. Burnt material, the physical signature that identifies these sites, was covered over with soil at some point before records were last updated, leaving no visible surface trace whatsoever.

A fulacht fia is typically a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, the accumulated debris from a process in which stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They date predominantly from the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, and they cluster in low-lying or waterlogged ground, which is consistent with the location here beside a pond. The burnt and shattered stone that accumulates over repeated use is what archaeologists look for, and what normally survives. At Lackenbehy, local information suggests that material was deliberately or incidentally buried under added soil, making the site invisible at ground level.

What remains is essentially a coordinate, a place in a boggy field where something ancient was cooked over, used repeatedly, and eventually forgotten, and which has now been forgotten a second time under fresh earth.