It looks, at first glance, like a natural rise in the ground. It is not. What lies there is a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found in considerable numbers across Ireland and Britain, and one of the more quietly puzzling categories of monument that the Irish landscape contains.

Burnt mounds, known in Irish archaeology as fulachtaí fia, are the accumulated debris of repeated high-temperature activity, most likely ancient cooking or heating. The typical arrangement involves a trough, often timber-lined or cut into the ground, filled with water, which was then heated by dropping fire-heated stones into it. The stones, stressed by the repeated cycle of heating and immersion, crack and become useless, and so they are discarded to the side, building up over time into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped or oval mound of shattered, blackened rock. The process sounds laborious, but it worked efficiently, and sites like this one were in use predominantly during the Bronze Age, roughly between 2000 and 500 BC. Ireland has thousands of them, making them one of the most common prehistoric monument types in the country, yet they remain largely unnoticed by anyone not specifically looking.