The one at Levallinree in County Mayo is a quiet example of a type that appears so frequently it risks becoming unremarkable, yet each site carries the same fundamental strangeness: a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, typically beside a stream or boggy hollow, left behind by people who heated water by dropping burning stones into a trough. Bronze Age in date for the most part, though some may be earlier or later, they were long assumed to be cooking sites, a kind of outdoor catering operation for communal gatherings or hunting parties. More recent experiments and arguments have proposed alternatives, including sweat houses, textile processing, or brewing, and the honest answer is that no single explanation has settled the debate.

The name itself, roughly translatable from Irish as "wild deer cooking place" or sometimes associated with the word for an outlaw or landless man, reflects the older folklore attached to these sites before archaeology gave them a framework. The mounds form because the stones, once heated and plunged into water, crack and shatter and cannot be reused efficiently, so they are simply raked aside into a growing heap around the trough. Over centuries the organic material around them compresses into peat and the whole feature sinks gently into the landscape, often surviving precisely because it occupies wet, marginal ground that was never worth draining or ploughing. Mayo, with its abundant bogland and poor upland soils, holds a considerable number of them.