That is, in a sense, the whole point. Somewhere beneath reclaimed farmland in north Cork, the remains of a fulacht fia lie buried and largely forgotten, the mound that once marked its presence long since levelled, the stream beside it drained away. A fulacht fia is a type of Bronze Age cooking or processing site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after repeated use of a water trough heated with hot stones. They are among the most common ancient monument types in Ireland, yet this one has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

The 1936 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the mound on the southern side of a stream, set in what was then marshy ground. That kind of waterlogged, low-lying terrain is precisely where fulachta fiadh tend to cluster; ready access to water was central to how they functioned. At some point after that map was made, the land was improved for agriculture, the mound was levelled, and the stream was drained. The transformation was thorough enough that no visible surface trace remains today.

What survives is the cartographic record of the mound's former existence, a dot on a decades-old map marking something that had already endured for perhaps three thousand years before it was finally erased in the twentieth century.