That small uncertainty sits at the centre of a cluster of earthworks on a south-facing marshy slope at Courtstown, Co. Kilkenny, where a low mound enclosed by a fosse and outer bank was identified during fieldwork in 1994. A fulacht fiadh, in the conventional understanding, is a burnt mound left behind by repeated episodes of heating stones and dropping them into water-filled troughs, a practice most common in the Bronze Age. But the Courtstown mound fits awkwardly into that familiar story.

The mound sits within a rectangular enclosure defined by a bank roughly 3.6 metres wide and 0.35 metres high, and is further hemmed in by a field boundary to the west, with the enclosure open to the southwest. Spreading out to the southeast are several more rectangular earthworks, arranged in a loose sequence running northwest to southeast across a stretch of around fifty metres. Roughly twenty metres to the west lies a large square earthwork tentatively identified as the medieval castle and bawn of Courtstown, a bawn being the defended enclosure, typically walled, that would have surrounded an Irish tower house or fortified residence. The close spatial relationship between all these features is telling. Because the horseshoe mound appears contemporary with the surrounding rectangular earthworks rather than predating them, it seems more likely to belong to the same medieval or post-medieval phase of activity. The current thinking is that it may be a denuded kiln, worn down over time, rather than a prehistoric cooking site. Whether the rectangular enclosures served as settlement yards associated with the castle, or perhaps as formal garden features, remains an open question.