It measures roughly ten metres across and contains scorched material mixed through with compacted yellow stones. That combination is the giveaway. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The basic principle involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and using the hot water to cook meat. Over time, the cracked and spent stones were raked aside, building up into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at so many sites.

What makes Meenagloghrane quietly interesting is not that it stands alone. About seventy metres to the north-east lies a second possible fulacht fia, which suggests this stretch of wet ground was returned to more than once, or perhaps used in parallel. Marshy terrain was not accidental. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found near water, and low-lying, boggy spots like this one would have held a reliable supply. The yellow stones packed into the mound here are likely the thermally fractured remains of those repeated firings, the archaeological residue of a process repeated across millennia and across almost every county in the country.