It looks, at first glance, like a slight rise in the bog, easy to walk past without a second thought. What it actually represents is a cooking technology used across Ireland for well over a thousand years of prehistory.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in their hundreds across the Irish landscape, typically in wet or low-lying ground close to a water source. The name, loosely translated, refers to a cooking place, and the mechanics were straightforward: a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined, was filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The broken, heat-shattered stones were then discarded to the sides, building up over repeated use into the horseshoe-shaped or circular mound that survives today. At Ummeraboy, the mound sits roughly twenty metres south of a stream, close enough for reliable water access, and the central depression, around six metres in diameter, is likely the ghost of that original trough. The narrow opening on the north-western side may reflect the practical arrangement of the working area around it.