Each time the ground is turned, a spread of burnt material surfaces, the blackened and fire-cracked stones that are the calling card of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking place found in great numbers across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date, and usually consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough or pit. The method is thought to have involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. Over time the cracked and discarded stones accumulate into the characteristic mound. At Barrahaurin, no such mound appears to have survived as an upstanding feature. What remains is the buried scatter of that same burnt and broken stone, glimpsed only when the soil is disturbed. It is the kind of site that exists in the record largely because a local observer noticed something odd turning up in the furrows.

The site is a reminder of how much of the Irish prehistoric landscape survives not as dramatic earthworks but as faint signatures below ground, known mainly to the people who work the land above them.