This one at Scarteen in north County Cork offers nothing of the sort. There is no mound, no depression, no marker of any kind above ground. The only reason anyone knows something ancient lies here is that a person digging foundations for a shed turned up material that should not have been there, and someone thought to mention it.

What that person found was the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up around a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined, that was dug into the ground near a water source. Stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the trough to boil water, and the discarded, shattered stones gradually accumulated into the characteristic mound. Thousands of these sites survive as low, rounded mounds in boggy ground, often overlooked or mistaken for natural features. At Scarteen, even that modest surface trace is absent. The material came to light only by accident, during construction work, and once the shed went up, the site effectively disappeared again.