It looks, at first glance, like an unremarkable rise in a waterlogged pasture field. What it actually represents is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. Fulachtaí fia are Bronze Age cooking sites, typically identified by their horseshoe or kidney-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone. The prevailing theory is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, cooking meat or perhaps serving some other communal purpose. The broken, fire-cracked stone was then discarded into the surrounding mound, building it up over repeated use.

This particular example in Leitra was formally identified in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, following a map annotation made by Tom Coffey in 1994. The mound itself runs roughly ten metres on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis and reaches a maximum height of about 0.8 metres at its eastern end, tapering to around 0.25 metres at the west. Its south-south-western end curves away to the north-west, giving the mound a slight arc. A large white stone sits at the centre of the eastern edge, and holly bushes have taken root along the north-north-eastern margin. A later field wall, running north-east to south-west, cuts across the south-western end, a reminder that the land has been parcelled and managed long after whoever built the mound had gone. A second fulacht fia lies roughly a hundred metres to the north-west, suggesting that this stretch of low ground beside the stream was a place people returned to, or that different groups found the same qualities of accessible water and fuel worth exploiting across many generations.