To the untrained eye it might read as a slight rise in the grass, overgrown and unremarkable. But the burnt stone and ash visible at its edges tell a different story, one stretching back into prehistory.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in considerable numbers across Ireland and generally associated with Bronze Age activity, roughly 1500 to 500 BC. The precise function of these sites has been debated for decades; the most widely accepted interpretation is that they were cooking places, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to boil meat, though uses ranging from bathing to textile processing have also been proposed. The mound itself is the byproduct: the cracked, fire-shattered stone discarded after repeated use. At Poulnalour, the mound is substantial, measuring approximately 14 metres east to west and 11 metres north to south, with an external height of around 1.2 metres. It opens to the north, and that northern edge has been cut by a later wall and trackway running east to west, a reminder that later generations had their own practical claims on the landscape without much concern for what lay beneath. The site was noted on Robinson's map of 1977, and the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 already recorded the surrounding area as liable to flooding, which fits the pattern well; fulachtaí fia are almost always found near reliable sources of water. A second example of the same monument type lies roughly 122 metres to the south, suggesting this stretch of ground was a focus for activity over a long period.