This one in Garryadeen, County Cork, offers none of that. There is no visible surface trace whatsoever, and the only reason it appears in the record at all is that burnt material came to light during routine field fence clearance. Someone was doing ordinary farm maintenance, disturbed the ground, and inadvertently confirmed that people had been cooking here, possibly three or four thousand years ago.

A fulacht fia, sometimes spelled fulacht fiadh, is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying or marshy ground. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The used, shattered stones were piled to the side, forming the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at so many sites. At Garryadeen, that mound either never formed to a significant height, has been ploughed or worn flat over the centuries, or lies just below the current ground surface without expression above it. What the fence clearance turned up was the burnt and fire-cracked stone that is the diagnostic signature of the site type. A second fulacht fiadh is recorded approximately 80 metres to the south-east, which suggests this particular corner of mid Cork saw repeated or prolonged use during prehistory, a pattern that is not unusual given how frequently these sites cluster near one another along watercourses and wet ground.