But that is precisely what this site at Lisheen in County Cork amounts to, and the way it came to light is entirely typical of how such things tend to emerge: not through excavation, but through the accidental cut of a drain.

What the drain exposed is a fulacht fia, a term used for a class of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying, waterlogged ground. The standard interpretation involves a trough filled with water, into which stones heated in a nearby fire were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The repeated heating and sudden cooling eventually shattered the stones, leaving behind a characteristic mound of burnt and fractured material that can survive for millennia with remarkable fidelity. Ireland has thousands of these sites, making them one of the most common monument types in the country, yet individually they are easy to overlook, and many, like this one, are only glimpsed in the walls of drainage cuts or eroding banks rather than through deliberate investigation. The spread recorded at Lisheen measures 6.5 metres in visible section, which gives some sense of the volume of accumulated burnt stone without telling us where the full extent of the deposit begins or ends.