It looks, to the untrained eye, like nothing more than a grassy hump in a field. In fact it is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological record, and it has been sitting here, largely unnoticed, for somewhere between three and four thousand years.

A fulacht fia is essentially a burnt-mound cooking site, the remains of a Bronze Age method of heating water by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, then plunging in meat or other materials. The stones, cracked by the thermal shock, were discarded in a mound around the trough, which is why these sites are characterised by their distinctive scorched, ashy material and their horseshoe or crescent shape. This example measures ten metres north to south and 6.3 metres east to west, rising between 0.4 and 0.7 metres above the surrounding ground. At its centre is the original trough, roughly square and about two metres across in each direction, surviving to a depth of 0.25 metres and open towards the east. The whole thing sits on a slight rise within an ancient field system, part of a wider landscape of human activity that has been slowly returning to scrub and overgrowth.