This one at Garryadeen in County Cork offers none of that. It exists in the record only because someone was digging a drainage channel and turned up burnt material in the soil, a quiet, accidental discovery that points to a site with no visible surface trace whatsoever. What lies beneath, or once lay there, is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal left behind after repeated episodes of water-heating. The stones were fired in a hearth and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, a method that sounds laborious but proved effective enough to be used across millennia.

The burnt material recovered here is the only physical evidence recorded for this particular site, and the circumstances of its discovery, a drainage operation rather than a formal excavation, mean that little else is known about its extent, date, or condition. What adds a layer of quiet interest is that a second possible fulacht fia has been noted approximately twenty metres to the south-west. Whether the two are contemporary, related, or simply coincidental neighbours cannot be said on current evidence. The Garryadeen area falls within Mid Cork, a landscape where such sites are not uncommon, though most leave at least a low spread of scorched stone visible at the surface. That this one does not, and was only caught at all by the chance intervention of a drainage spade, gives it an almost provisional quality, a site that nearly remained entirely invisible.