To an untrained eye it might read as nothing more than a dark patch in the soil, but that scatter of scorched stone and charred earth is the remains of a fulacht fia, one of the most numerous and least-celebrated monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape.

Fulachtaí fia, found in their thousands across Ireland, are the remnants of prehistoric cooking sites, typically dated to the Bronze Age, though some examples span a much wider period. The basic principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. The repeated heating and rapid cooling caused the stones to crack and fracture, and over time the discarded fragments accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive today. Their proximity to water was not incidental; a reliable source was essential to the whole process, and the stream on whose eastern bank this example sits would have served exactly that purpose. The sheer scale of the Lissacrue spread, covering an area comparable to a modest house, suggests sustained and repeated use rather than a single occasion.