The place is Gooseberryhill, and what lies beneath the trees is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The name is sometimes rendered as fulacht fiadh, and the basic principle involves heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to a boil, and using the heated water to cook meat. Over time, the cracked and spent stones accumulate into a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound of blackened, shattered material, which is precisely what survives here.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1936, where it appears as an oval mound to the south-east of a stream, a location entirely typical of the type. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water, which was an operational necessity rather than a coincidence of survival. What makes Gooseberryhill particularly interesting is that it is not an isolated find. It belongs to a cluster of six such sites in the immediate area, a concentration that suggests this stretch of north Cork was used repeatedly and perhaps intensively for communal activity during the Bronze Age, when most fulachtaí fiadh are thought to have been in use. The spread of burnt material here has since been planted over with conifers, which has both protected and obscured the mound, leaving it as a subtle, tree-shaded rise rather than an open earthwork.