To a passing eye it reads as nothing more than a slight rise in the ground, but beneath the turf lies a spread of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a Bronze Age cooking site, typically found close to a water source. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it to a boil quickly enough to cook meat. The cracked, heat-shattered stones were then discarded to the side, building up over time into the horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive in their thousands across Ireland. The positioning of this one, close to the stream to the south-west, fits that pattern precisely. What makes Ballygrady quietly notable is that it does not stand alone: a second fulacht fia lies approximately a hundred and twenty metres to the south-west, suggesting that this particular stretch of ground was returned to repeatedly, perhaps over generations, for whatever purpose these sites served. Cooking is the dominant theory, though some researchers have proposed other uses, from textile processing to brewing.