To the untrained eye it reads as nothing more than a slight rise in a working field, but the scorched and fragmented stone beneath the turf tells a different story. This is a fulacht fia, the most common type of prehistoric monument in Ireland, and its very ordinariness is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

Fulachta fiadh, the plural form, are generally understood to have functioned as outdoor cooking places, most likely dating to the Bronze Age. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough, bringing the water to a boil. The stones, cracked and spent from repeated heating, were raked out and discarded nearby, gradually building up the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of shattered, fire-blackened material that survives at so many sites across the Irish countryside. At Gowlane, this particular example is one of three that once stood close together, forming a small cluster in the same stretch of land. In 1986, all three were levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement work, leaving only the subsurface scatter of burnt stone where the mounds had stood. Two neighbouring sites share the same fate and the same field.