It does not look like much from a distance, perhaps a natural rise in the ground, but the burnt stone packed into it marks it out as a fulacht fia, one of the most common and yet most quietly puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is generally understood to be a prehistoric cooking site. The usual interpretation is that water was boiled in a trough by dropping fire-heated stones into it, the stones shattering with repeated use and being discarded into a crescentic or irregular heap nearby. The resulting mounds, dark with charcoal and fragmented burnt stone, survive across Ireland in their thousands, most dating to the Bronze Age. The example at Labbamolaga Middle sits in the kind of location typical of the type: low-lying ground beside a water source, in this case both a stream to the west and a well close by. Whether the well is ancient or more recent is not recorded, but the proximity of two water sources to a single site is a detail worth noticing.