Some of that same burnt debris has been worked into a nearby field fence, absorbed into the landscape so thoroughly that it reads, at first glance, as nothing more than a farm boundary. What it actually marks is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone accumulated beside a water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, though some scholars have proposed additional uses, from brewing to hide-working to bathing.

The site at Knockearagh sits to the south of the stream that would have supplied it, and the drain running along its northern edge has cut through roughly eight metres of the spread, giving an accidental cross-section through centuries of accumulated use. Fulachtaí fia are notoriously difficult to date with precision without excavation, but most Irish examples cluster in the Bronze Age, broadly the second millennium BC. What makes the Knockearagh site particularly interesting is its proximity to a second fulacht fia located approximately ten metres to the south-west, the two monuments sitting close enough together to suggest either repeated use of the same favoured location across time, or something more coordinated. Whether they were in use simultaneously or represent successive episodes of activity, their pairing is a quiet reminder that these sites were not random; people returned to particular places, particular streams, particular stretches of ground.