To a passing eye it might suggest nothing more than a patch of disturbed ground, but what lies beneath is the remnant of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape.

A fulacht fia is, in essence, an ancient cooking site. The typical arrangement involves a trough dug into the ground, usually near a water source, and a mound of shattered stone built up beside it from repeated use. The method was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. Over time, the thermally fractured stone accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at thousands of sites across Ireland, with the opening of the horseshoe marking where the trough once sat. At Loughane, that opening faces south. The mound itself is described as barely perceptible now, its profile so worn by time and agricultural activity that it takes a careful eye to distinguish it from the surrounding pasture.