This one offers nothing to the eye at all. Somewhere beneath a pasture field on the southern bank of a stream in Rathduff, County Cork, lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically recognised by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up over centuries of use. Here, the mound is gone, or has never been visible, and the only indication that anything lies beneath the grass comes when a plough breaks the surface and drags up a dark spread of burnt material.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, dating broadly to the Bronze Age, though some were used into the early medieval period. They were generally sited close to water, which was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, the accumulated cracked and blackened stones forming the characteristic mounds that survive at so many other sites. At Rathduff, the buried remains sit close to a stream, consistent with that pattern. What makes the site quietly notable is less what it contains than the company it keeps: a second fulacht fia lies approximately seventy metres to the west, suggesting this stretch of ground was a place of repeated, purposeful activity rather than a single isolated episode.