But this D-shaped rise of stone and black clay, roughly thirteen metres across and less than a metre high, is almost certainly a fulacht fia, one of the Bronze Age cooking sites found in their thousands across Ireland. The typical interpretation is that these mounds represent the accumulated waste, cracked hearthstones and charcoal-blackened earth, left behind after repeated episodes of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They are among the most common prehistoric monuments in the Irish landscape, yet each one carries its own small puzzles.

This particular example near Murrooghtoohy is slightly unusual in its shape. Most fulachtaí fia are horseshoe or kidney-shaped, the hollow at the centre marking where the trough once sat. Here, the straight eastern edge gives the mound its D-profile, and that geometry may not be entirely prehistoric. The adjacent farmstead, dated to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, appears to have disturbed the site, and large stones placed around the mound's perimeter are thought to have been added during that same period, possibly to consolidate or contain a feature that was already a visible presence in the field. The slight raised rim along the western edge, only about twenty centimetres wide and equally modest in height, is the one element that retains something closer to its original form. Positioned on a gentle south-facing slope roughly two hundred and fifty metres from the sea, the mound would have had no shortage of water nearby, which is consistent with how these sites tend to be located.