Somewhere beneath the grass, immediately north-west of a spring, lies what was once a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland and Britain. The typical form is a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and dark, charred earth, the accumulated debris of a process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. At Liscongill, that mound is gone, levelled at some point during the 1940s according to local memory, and the land shows no visible trace of what was there.

What survives is the description passed down by people who knew the site before it was cleared: a horseshoe shape, the characteristic burnt material, and an opening facing south. The proximity to a spring is entirely in keeping with what archaeologists understand about how fulachta fiadh were used. Water was essential to the process, and the majority of known examples sit close to streams, bogs, or natural springs. The site at Liscongill is not alone in its townland either. A second fulacht fia lies roughly 140 metres to the south-west, suggesting this small area of north Cork was, at some point in the Bronze Age, a place of repeated or sustained activity of this kind, even if the landscape today gives no indication of it.