No scorched stones remain, no mound rises from the ground, and the well that once stood thirty metres to the northeast has long since been drained. What was here, until 1986, was a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of Bronze Age cooking sites found across Ireland. The mound of burnt material that marked it was levelled that year, and with it went the most legible part of the record.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland. They typically consist of a trough, often timber-lined or stone-lined, into which water was channelled or collected, and a surrounding mound of heat-shattered stone and charcoal, the waste product of repeatedly heating rocks and dropping them into the water to bring it to a boil. The method is simple and surprisingly effective. The site at Nursetown More sits roughly 130 metres south of the River Lyre, which would have provided a reliable water source for exactly this kind of activity. The proximity of a well, now gone, adds another layer to what was evidently a water-rich corner of the landscape. Whether the site was used for cooking, brewing, textile processing, or some combination of these purposes, as current debate about such sites tends to allow, cannot be determined from what survives.

What remains is essentially negative evidence: an absence of burnt stone where burnt stone once was, and a discolouration in the soil that marks the footprint of the vanished mound. It is the kind of site that rewards a particular kind of attention, not the dramatic silhouette of a standing stone or the clear geometry of a ringfort, but a faint trace that only makes sense once you know what to look for and what was lost.