A fulacht fia, the most common type of prehistoric monument found in Ireland, once occupied a patch of pasture here in County Cork. These structures, which date mostly from the Bronze Age, are typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, the accumulated debris of a cooking or processing method that involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. At Rochfordstown, even that mound is gone.

The site was recorded by Walsh in 1985, who noted a levelled mound in pasture. Local information, gathered at some point before the mid-1990s, attributed the levelling to drainage works carried out around 1975. Whatever had survived in the ground up to that point was effectively erased in the process. A second fulacht fia lies in an adjoining field to the south, suggesting that this part of Cork once saw repeated or sustained activity of the same kind, two sites close enough together to imply something about how this landscape was used in prehistory, even if the details are now unrecoverable.