Beneath the grass, though, there is burnt material, the residue of a fulacht fia, an ancient cooking site of a type found across Ireland in enormous numbers, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The usual form involves a trough filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled, with the shattered and blackened stones accumulating into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that makes these sites recognisable.

This particular site had a clear shape within living memory. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded it as a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter, which is a respectable size. By the time the same landscape was mapped again in 1937, the form had already begun to erode, marked only as a hachured arc and labelled with the Irish name fulacht fiadh. Since then, the arc has been levelled entirely, leaving only the scorched and fire-cracked material underground as evidence of what was once visible. What makes the Ballyhoura site quietly interesting, however, is that it is not alone. Two further fulachtaí fia lie within a hundred metres or so, one roughly a hundred and ten metres to the north-north-east, another about a hundred metres to the south-east. Three such sites in close proximity suggests this corner of the Ballyhoura area saw repeated or sustained activity, though whether they were contemporary with one another or represent separate episodes across a long span of time is not something the surface evidence can answer.