This particular one sits among trees and rough grazing, a low mound of fire-cracked stone measuring seventeen metres along its longest axis and rising only about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. It is the kind of monument easy to walk past without registering, yet the sheer quantity of burnt stone underfoot tells a quietly insistent story.

A fulacht fia, the term used for these Bronze Age cooking sites, typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped or irregular mound of shattered stone accumulated beside a trough. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled pit to bring it to the boil, presumably for cooking meat. The mound grows over time from the discarded, heat-fractured stone that is no longer useful for retaining heat. At Gortlecka, the main mound is irregularly shaped rather than the classic horseshoe, with a later field wall built across its western and southern edges, suggesting the site was not recognised for what it was when the wall went up, or simply that it was convenient material to build against. Two further spreads of burnt stone lie nearby, one about four metres away and another roughly twenty-five metres to the north-west, hinting at repeated or extended activity in the same wet, low-lying ground. The site was not included in the Record of Monuments and Places as a separate entry in 1996, but a 1994 map annotation by Tom Coffey brought it and a nearby companion site to official attention.

What makes the Gortlecka group genuinely unusual is the density of these monuments in such a small area. Three of the four fulachtaí fia are spaced roughly sixty-five metres apart, with a fourth about a hundred and forty metres to the south-south-west, giving the whole cluster an almost measured regularity. Whether that reflects repeated seasonal use of a reliably wet landscape, separate family or community groups working the same productive ground, or something else entirely, is not yet clear. The flood-prone lough shore would have guaranteed the standing water these sites required, and that practical logic may simply have drawn people back to the same spot across generations.