But the shape is the giveaway. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date. The characteristic form is a crescent or horseshoe of fire-cracked, heat-shattered stone, built up over repeated use as rocks were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The mound at Gooseberryhill measures roughly eleven metres north to south and nine metres east to west, rising to about 0.8 metres in height, with a four-metre-wide opening facing west.

The proximity to the stream is entirely typical. Fulachtaí fia are almost invariably sited near a reliable water source, which would have fed the cooking trough, and the accumulated burnt and shattered stone was simply cast aside to form the mound over time. This particular site may be the same one noted by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, who recorded a fulacht fiadh on land belonging to a T. Collins in the area. That reference, brief as it is, gives the site a small documentary thread running back nearly a century, anchoring what might otherwise seem like an anonymous lump of scorched earth to a specific place and a named landowner in the early twentieth century.