At Lecarrow, on Clare Island off the Mayo coast, a layer of fire-cracked stone has been sliced through by a deep, V-shaped channel known on Ordnance Survey maps as Pollbrandy. The cutting revealed what the ground above it gave no hint of: the cross-section of a fulacht fia, one of the prehistoric cooking or industrial sites found in their thousands across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date, and usually identified by their distinctive crescent-shaped mounds of shattered, heat-fractured stone.

A fulacht fia generally worked by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a process efficient enough to cook large joints of meat. The Lecarrow example measures roughly 3.6 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and reaches a maximum thickness of around 0.35 metres where it appears in the cutting face. It sits on relatively flat ground near the head of an outflow gully from Lough na bPoll, a location consistent with the pattern seen at other fulachta fia, which almost invariably appear close to a water source. The original stream course that would have supplied that water is no longer visible at the surface. The site was documented as part of the New Survey of Clare Island, a wide-ranging archaeological study of the island edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning, and John Waddell and published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2007.

What makes this particular example a little melancholy is its completeness, or rather the lack of it. No surface trace survives on either bank of the modern cutting. The mound, if there ever was one, has either eroded away or been removed, and the only reason anyone knows the site exists at all is because a drainage machine happened to cut through it. It is archaeology revealed by subtraction, the past glimpsed in a wound in the ground rather than in anything deliberately preserved.