The one at Curraderra in County Clare is typical in its quiet anonymity, a low horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone sitting in damp ground, easy to walk past without a second glance. The name translates roughly as "wild deer cooking place", a romantic label that has stuck despite considerable debate about what these sites were actually used for.

Fulachtaí fia date mostly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some are earlier or later. The standard interpretation is that they functioned as outdoor cooking sites. A trough, often timber-lined and dug into waterlogged ground, would have been filled with water; stones were heated in a nearby fire and then dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil. The characteristic crescent mound is the accumulated debris of those shattered, heat-fractured stones, discarded after repeated use. Experiments have shown the method works efficiently, bringing a substantial volume of water to boiling point within a reasonable time. More recent theories have proposed that the troughs may have served as hot tubs, fulling troughs for processing wool, or even brewing vessels, and the debate has not been fully settled. The example at Curraderra sits within a landscape of County Clare that has yielded many such monuments, the boggy, low-lying ground preserving both the physical remains and, in some cases, the organic material that allows radiocarbon dating.