It is not. Beneath the vegetation lies a spread of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the accumulated debris of an ancient cooking site known as a fulacht fia. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, represent a form of prehistoric outdoor cooking in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water to a boil. The trough itself was typically a timber-lined pit sunk into the ground, and the discarded, shattered stones were heaped to one side after each use, eventually forming the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at places like this.

Fulachtaí fia are most commonly associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some have produced dates ranging outside that window. The choice of marshy or waterlogged ground was deliberate; a high water table meant the trough would fill naturally and remain full. At Berrings, a small settlement in mid-Cork, the site follows exactly this logic, positioned in wet ground where water would have been readily available. The mound itself is composed of the burnt material typical of these sites, the blackened, heat-shattered stone that accumulates over repeated use and gives fulachtaí fia their distinctive dark, scorched appearance in section. Whether the site was used purely for cooking, or served other purposes such as bathing or textile processing, as some researchers have proposed, cannot be determined from surface evidence alone.