It is barely forty centimetres high, and measures roughly six and a half metres north to south and just under ten metres east to west. What makes it quietly remarkable is what it is made of: burnt stone, cracked and fire-blackened, heaped up over centuries of use and then simply left.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying ground near water. The name, loosely translated from Irish, is traditionally associated with the hunting parties of early medieval legend, though most examples date to the Bronze Age, somewhere between 1800 and 800 BC. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, cooking meat or perhaps serving other purposes such as textile processing or bathing. The spent, shattered stones were thrown aside after each use, and over time these discards accumulated into the horseshoe or oval mounds that survive today. The proximity to running water was not incidental; the trough needed a reliable source, and the stream along the northern edge of this site at Shandrum would have provided exactly that. Ireland has thousands of fulachta fiadh, making them one of the most common prehistoric monument types in the country, yet individually they attract little attention, which is perhaps why so many have survived.