This one in Nunstown, County Kerry, has been quietly buried under a pile of drainage material, and there is nothing left to see. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence, and what it hints at beneath the surface of a soggy Kerry field.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a horseshoe or crescent-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal left over from repeated use. The method generally involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a practical solution in an era before metal vessels that could be placed directly over flame. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, most often in low-lying, wet ground near a reliable water source. The Nunstown example sits in poorly drained pasture fed by natural springs, which is exactly the kind of location these sites favour. Local information recorded a low crescent-shaped mound of burnt material here before it was obscured, and a related burnt spread lies roughly a hundred metres to the east, suggesting this was not an isolated episode of prehistoric activity but part of a small cluster. The drainage works that buried the site were probably intended to make the waterlogged ground more useful for agriculture, which is a common reason such sites disappear without formal excavation.