Yet this small rectangular depression in a field at Killacolla, in the barony of Shanid in County Limerick, represents something genuinely difficult to pin down: the probable remnant of a fire, laid down at an unknown point in the past, which left almost nothing behind except a scorch on some stones and a slight hollow in the earth.

The feature came to light in September 1989 during the excavation of a short cist nearby. A short cist is a small, box-like burial chamber made of upright slabs, typically associated with the Bronze Age, and it was while investigating the one recorded as LI018-01102- that archaeologist Martin Doody encountered this separate depression roughly two metres to the south. Measuring 0.3 metres north to south and 0.7 metres east to west, it contained a setting of stones that showed, in Doody's words, "some trace of burning", leading him to conclude it was "most likely to have been a hearth site". No finds were recovered from it at all. No pottery, no bone, no tool fragments, nothing to confirm a date or suggest who made the fire or why.

Because the hearth produced no associated finds, and because the surviving record amounts to a depression and a few scorched stones, there is little for a visitor to seek out in any conventional sense. The site lies in the Shanid area of west County Limerick, a part of the county better known for its Anglo-Norman castle than for its prehistoric remains, though prehistoric features do occur throughout the wider landscape here. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in August 2011. Its interest lies less in what it offers to the eye and more in what it represents as a category of evidence: the kind of trace that only becomes visible when something else, in this case a burial, draws excavators to a field in the first place.