That kind of loss, quiet and undramatic, is far more common in the Irish archaeological record than any dramatic act of excavation or preservation.

A fulacht fia is a burnt mound, typically Bronze Age in origin, formed from the accumulated debris of repeated episodes of water-heating. The usual method involved dropping fire-heated stones into a trough of water until it boiled, most likely for cooking meat. The crescent or horseshoe shape so characteristic of these sites comes from the way shattered, heat-spent stones were thrown aside around the trough's edge. At Rathmorrissy, the site sat on low-lying marshy ground, and when Cody recorded it in 1983, the mound measured roughly nine metres east to west and seven metres north to south, rising to a modest half-metre at its highest point. Its southern opening faced what may have been a dried-up watercourse, visible as a shallow hollow-way; proximity to a reliable water supply is a near-universal feature of fulachta fia. By 1984, however, disturbance had reduced the mound to a scatter of burnt stone, charcoal, and blackened earth. The monument had effectively vanished within twelve months of being formally described. Two further fulachta fia survive in the same area, one roughly eighty metres to the south-east and another about a hundred and ten metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this corner of Galway once saw sustained and repeated activity of this kind across the landscape.