Beneath the turf lies a spread of burnt material, the signature remnant of a fulacht fia, and the stream nearby is almost certainly no coincidence.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monuments found across Ireland. They are the residue of an ancient cooking method, typically Bronze Age in origin, in which water held in a trough was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those stones, once shattered by the repeated cycle of heating and quenching, were raked out and discarded, and it is their dark, crumbly accumulation that gives a fulacht fia its distinctive horseshoe-shaped or spread mound. Their proximity to water is almost universal; a reliable source nearby was essential to the whole process. The Rusheen example, grass-covered and apparently undisturbed, preserves that same quiet logic, sitting close to its stream in what has probably been farmland for centuries.