Beneath that turf, however, lies a spread of burnt material that marks it out as a fulacht fia, one of the most common and yet most quietly puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is, in essence, the remains of an ancient outdoor cooking site, typically Bronze Age in origin, though some examples span a wider period. The characteristic method involved heating stones in a fire and then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. The stones, repeatedly cracked by thermal shock, were discarded in a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough, and it is these spreads of shattered, fire-reddened stone that survive in the ground. At Clashroe, what remains visible at the surface is simply a grass-covered spread of this burnt material, recorded on the basis of local information rather than any excavation or close inspection. The site was not directly accessed at the time it was noted, which means what lies beneath remains essentially unknown beyond that telling smear of scorched debris.