The one at Mooghaun in County Clare sits in an area already remarkable for its prehistoric density, close to one of the largest Iron Age hillforts in the country. That proximity alone makes it worth pausing over.

A fulacht fia, in basic terms, is a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough, usually timber-lined, that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping stones from a fire directly into it. The process is surprisingly efficient; experiments have shown water can be brought to the boil within minutes using this method. These sites are found near water sources, often in low-lying or marshy ground, and they date broadly to the Bronze Age, though some continued in use later. Mooghaun itself is best known for the great hillfort enclosing its summit, a monument of considerable scale, and for the Mooghaun hoard, a collection of Late Bronze Age gold objects found nearby in the nineteenth century, one of the largest such finds in western Europe. A fulacht fia in this landscape fits a pattern of sustained prehistoric activity across several centuries, communities returning to or persisting in a place that clearly held significance over a long span of time.