These are the remains of ancient cooking places, typically Bronze Age in date, built around a trough dug into the ground near a water source. Stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, a process that left behind the characteristic signature of a horseshoe-shaped mound of cracked and fire-shattered stone. Thousands of these sites survive across Ireland, and Clare has a notable concentration of them, scattered across boggy ground and river margins where the water table cooperated with the method.

The fulacht fia at Gorteen belongs to this widespread but quietly remarkable tradition. The name itself, loosely translated as the cooking place of the deer or of the wild, hints at older interpretations of the sites as hunters' camps, though modern archaeology tends to see them as serving a broader range of communal functions, possibly including bathing, textile processing, or brewing, in addition to food preparation. Most date to the Bronze Age, roughly between 1500 and 500 BC, though some examples have been recorded from earlier and later periods. The low, often waterlogged mounds they leave behind are easily overlooked, blending into the surrounding pasture or bog, which is part of why so many survived intact into the present century.