It is the kind of site that passes entirely unnoticed unless you already know what you are looking for, yet it belongs to one of the most widespread monument types in the Irish landscape.

This is a fulacht fia, a term used for the remains of a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date. The usual form is a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up around a trough, which would have been filled with water and heated by dropping stones from a nearby fire into the liquid. Thousands of these sites have been recorded across Ireland, and they tend to cluster near water. What makes the Lisladeen example particularly interesting is its context: it is not an isolated find but one of a group of three fulachta fiadh in close proximity to one another, suggesting that this corner of mid Cork saw repeated or sustained prehistoric activity of this kind. The spread of burnt material has been observed, but archaeological investigation has not yet established how far it extends beneath the surface.