They destroy sites, yes, but they also find them, and the fulacht fia at Tinnynarr in County Longford is a case in point. It came to light not through deliberate survey but through archaeological testing carried out ahead of road construction in 2004, the kind of investigative groundwork that has quietly transformed our understanding of prehistoric activity across the Irish midlands.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a prehistoric cooking or processing site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, the residue of repeatedly heating stones and dropping them into water-filled troughs. The Tinnynarr example, when excavated in 2005, turned out to be a diminished version of that familiar picture. What the excavator, working under the reference Tinnynarr 002, found were several small, truncated features, heavily disturbed by centuries of agricultural activity. The charcoal and burnt stone that survived were enough to suggest a fulacht fia had once been present, but the site had been so damaged that only fragments of its original character remained. Adding some context to the find, a burnt mound sits approximately 130 metres to the south-east, suggesting that prehistoric activity in this corner of Longford was not isolated to a single episode or location.