What had survived for perhaps three thousand years was levelled in the course of a single agricultural improvement, leaving behind only a spread of burnt material as evidence that anything had been there at all.

The site was a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in considerable numbers across Ireland and dating primarily to the Bronze Age. The term, loosely translated from Old Irish, refers to a cooking place associated with roving hunters or warriors, though the precise social context remains debated among archaeologists. In practice, a fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones beside a trough, often timber-lined, into which water was poured and heated by dropping in stones from a fire. The stones shatter with repeated heating and cooling, and it is this distinctive spread of fragmented, burnt rock that accumulates into the mound over time. At Coolowen, that characteristic scatter of burnt material remained visible even after the mound itself was gone, a kind of archaeological shadow of the original feature. The site was recorded by Walsh in 1985, and the levelling event documented there places the destruction firmly within living memory.