But the fulacht fia at Pluckanes, in mid Cork, belongs to a class of monument that quietly punctuates the Irish landscape in extraordinary numbers, and whose purpose remained poorly understood for much of modern scholarship.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is a Bronze Age cooking or heating site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough, often cut into soft or waterlogged ground. The method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. The cracked, blackened stones were then discarded into a growing mound nearby. At Pluckanes, the site survives as a spread of this burnt material with sparse vegetation cover, sitting in pastureland with marshy ground immediately to its south, which is precisely the kind of damp, low-lying setting these sites consistently favour. The proximity to wet ground was practical rather than incidental; a reliable water source was essential to the whole operation.