The example at Mahallagh in County Cork sits in pasture as an unassuming kidney-shaped mound, roughly 22 metres long, 16 metres wide, and rising just 1.3 metres from the ground. What it actually represents is a Bronze Age cooking site, the mound itself being the accumulated debris of fire-cracked stone. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil, and then discarding the shattered, heat-spent stones to one side. Over repeated use, those discards piled up into exactly this kind of low, dark mound.

What makes the Mahallagh site particularly interesting is not the mound itself but its company. Another fulacht fiadh lies only about 20 metres to the north-east, the two sites close enough to suggest repeated or overlapping use of the same general area over time. The opening in the Mahallagh mound, which measures 7.3 metres wide and faces north-north-west, almost certainly marks where the trough once sat, the hollow at the centre of the operation around which all the activity turned. Whether the two neighbouring sites were used simultaneously, or represent distinct episodes of activity separated by generations, is the kind of question the archaeology alone cannot easily answer.