These are ancient cooking sites, typically Bronze Age in date, identified by a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone. The working theory, well supported by experimental archaeology, is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it rapidly to a boil. Meat could then be cooked, wrapped in straw or hide, in the steaming water. Ireland has thousands of these sites, more than almost anywhere else in Europe, yet the one at Tullyvoghan remains quietly unsung even by the modest standards of the type.

Fulachtaí fia, to use the Irish plural, tend to cluster near streams, rivers, or boggy ground, since a reliable water source was essential to their function. The burnt stone mounds survive because the fractured, fire-cracked material was simply raked aside after each use, accumulating over time into the low, dark mounds that field archaeologists learn to recognise in pasture or cut peat. Most examples date to somewhere between 1500 and 500 BC, though some are older and a handful appear to have been used into the early medieval period. The site at Tullyvoghan fits into this widespread but poorly documented class of monument, one of many scattered across the Clare landscape that speak to sustained prehistoric activity in an area not always associated in the popular imagination with Bronze Age settlement.