This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically identified by the distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone that accumulates over centuries of use. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a process that shatters and blackens the stone, leaving behind the characteristic spreads that still dot Irish fields today.

At Gowlane, the mound had reached a height of four feet before it was levelled, probably for agricultural convenience, at the turn of the twentieth century. That detail comes from P. J. Hartnett, writing in 1939, which means the destruction was within living memory when he recorded it. What remains now is the scorched and broken material that the levelling could not easily remove, lying flat in the pasture and visible mainly as a discolouration in the ground cover. The mound itself, which would have been a modest but conspicuous feature in the landscape, is gone. What survives is essentially the footprint of something that was already being erased before anyone thought to formally record it.