It measures roughly two metres by one and three-quarter metres, and rises only half a metre from the ground, making it easy to walk past without a second glance. What gives it away, to anyone paying attention, is its composition: the mound is built almost entirely of burnt material, the kind of heat-cracked and fire-blackened stone that accumulates over repeated episodes of intense burning and cooling. A stream has been slowly eroding its south-eastern edge, which means the site is both exposed and gradually diminishing.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically dated to the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and the discarded burnt stone was piled nearby over time, forming the distinctive horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today. What makes the Coolies site particularly interesting is not the mound itself but its immediate context: just two metres to the west, separated by nothing more than a narrow grass path, lies a second fulacht fia. The pairing suggests that this spot at the confluence of two streams was returned to repeatedly, the water supply being precisely the resource that made it useful.