It measures roughly ten metres long, six metres wide, and barely thirty centimetres high, worn down further by cattle over the years. What lies beneath that unassuming surface is a concentration of burnt material, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in great numbers across Ireland. The typical arrangement involves a trough dug into the ground, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it; those stones, once spent, were piled to the side, gradually building up the dark, scorched mounds that survive today. The Rathaneague example is one of at least three in close proximity, with two further fulachta fiadh recorded to the north-north-west and north-north-east. That clustering is not unusual. These sites tend to gather near one another and near reliable sources of water, which the waterlogged ground here clearly provides. Their relationship to the nearby ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, is harder to pin down; the two monument types do not necessarily belong to the same period, but their proximity in the landscape is the kind of detail that makes a quiet field in Cork worth pausing over.