This one in Knockane, County Cork, is notable for what does not. A fulacht fia, the term used for a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source, was recorded at this location to the east of a stream. By the time anyone went looking, it was gone, submerged beneath an artificial lake created by sand and gravel extraction works.

The site appeared on the 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means it was visible and mappable within living memory. At some point after that, industrial quarrying in the area transformed the landscape entirely, flooding not just this fulacht fia but two others that lay close by. Three prehistoric sites, all of the same type, all lost to the same cause. Fulachta fiadh are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, found in their thousands across the country, and their clustering in particular areas is thought to reflect patterns of seasonal movement or communal activity in the Bronze Age. That three should sit in such proximity at Knockane suggests this stretch of ground once held some significance, however ordinary the activity, boiling water with heated stones, may have been to the people who used it.

There is nothing to see at Knockane now, and the flooded workings have erased whatever physical trace remained. The record of the site survives only in cartographic form, a dot on a map made nearly ninety years ago, marking something that had already endured for several thousand years before industry caught up with it.