The one at Ballybur in County Kilkenny sits within a fallow area enclosed by forestry, easy to overlook and largely undisturbed. A fulacht fia, for anyone who has not encountered the term, is a type of ancient cooking or processing site, typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stones and a timber-lined trough. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled pit, bringing it rapidly to the boil. The mound of discarded, heat-shattered stones that accumulated over repeated use is usually what survives, and what betrays the site to modern eyes.

The Ballybur example was identified by Prendergast in 1955, placing it within a mid-twentieth-century wave of fieldwork that brought many such sites formally onto the archaeological record for the first time. Fulachtaí fia are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though some have produced dates ranging well outside that period. The precise function of individual sites is still debated; alongside cooking, suggestions have included textile processing, bathing, and various craft activities involving hot water. The Kilkenny landscape is well populated with prehistoric remains, and the positioning of the Ballybur site within what is now a patch of fallow ground surrounded by trees gives it the particular, slightly removed quality common to monuments that have quietly outlasted every subsequent use of the land around them.