Yet beneath the reclaimed ground at Baltydaniel lies the remnant of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish countryside. A fulacht fia is, in essence, a prehistoric cooking place, typically consisting of a trough dug into the earth, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of those same stones once they had been used and discarded. The mounds survive in their thousands across Ireland, usually in low-lying or marshy ground, which made this particular spot entirely typical in its setting.

The site came to light not through deliberate excavation but through the kind of accidental exposure that infrastructure projects occasionally produce. During construction of the Bruff-Mallow gas pipeline in 1988, the removal of topsoil briefly revealed burnt material extending in from the left-hand side of the excavation corridor. The dimensions recorded by M. Gowen, who documented the find, were modest but clear: a maximum spread of six metres by four metres. The waterlogged, reclaimed pasture surrounding it is precisely the sort of ground where fulachta fiadh tend to cluster, the damp conditions having helped preserve organic and burnt material that would long since have vanished in drier soils.