This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left over from repeated use. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a process that gradually destroys the stones and builds up the distinctive mound. What makes the Meens example quietly compelling is not just what survives but where it sits: directly beside a spring, exactly the kind of water source these sites consistently favour.

The site was recorded in 1934 by Bowman, who noted it on land then belonging to E. O'Donovan. Even at that point the laneway to a nearby house was already encroaching, and the surviving evidence of burnt material had been pushed into a narrow strip between the lane and the field boundary to the east. What the record also reveals is that this is not an isolated find. A second fulacht fia lies roughly 120 metres to the north-east, and a third approximately 200 metres in the same direction. This clustering is not unusual; fulachtaí fia are often found in groups, suggesting that particular landscapes, especially those with reliable water and good grazing, attracted repeated activity across generations or even centuries of prehistoric use.