That arrangement is not accidental. It is the signature of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, almost always close to a water source. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal-rich earth, the debris left behind after repeated cycles of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. Thousands of these sites survive across the Irish countryside, most of them dating to the Bronze Age, and their sheer frequency suggests they were a routine feature of life rather than anything ceremonial.

This particular mound appears on a 1936 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, plotted in its position beside the well and near the stream. Beyond that cartographic record, the documented detail is sparse. What is known is that local information, gathered at some point before the turn of the millennium, indicated the mound was still present. The site was recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 4, covering north Cork, published in 2000, though direct access to the site was not achieved at the time of recording. The mound's survival into living memory, sitting quietly in the landscape alongside a well that itself may have considerable age, is about as much as the record confirms.