That description, matter-of-fact as it sounds, is essentially what a fulacht fia is: a cooking or processing site where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it rapidly to the boil. The blackened soil and the reddened, shattered stones are the characteristic signature left behind, and Ireland has thousands of such sites, making them among the most common prehistoric monuments in the country.

This particular example was recorded by Mary Sleeman, an archaeologist with Cork County Council, on 19th October 2011. She noted a spread of black charcoal-enriched soil mixed with reddened heat-shattered stones, measuring approximately thirteen metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west. That is a reasonably substantial footprint, suggesting repeated use over time rather than a single occasion. The stones shatter because the thermal shock of moving them from fire to water is extreme, and once cracked they lose their efficiency, so they were discarded into a growing mound beside the trough. Over centuries, that mound becomes the low, horseshoe-shaped earthwork that archaeologists and farmers alike have learned to recognise across Irish lowlands, particularly in damp or waterlogged ground.