These are prehistoric cooking sites, typically Bronze Age in date, identifiable by their characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone. The working principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it rapidly to a boil. Thousands of such sites survive across Ireland, and yet Slievemore, with its unusually dense concentration of archaeological remains, gives this one a particular kind of company.

Slievemore is already a place that rewards close attention. The mountain is home to a deserted village, a megalithic tomb, and a landscape that carries evidence of human activity stretching back millennia. The fulacht fia fits quietly into that longer story, a Bronze Age presence on ground that communities have returned to, left, and returned to again across thousands of years. The deserted village below, its roofless stone cottages still standing in long terraced rows, was occupied into the nineteenth century and used seasonally by transhumance farmers even after that, a practice known in Irish as booleying. The fulacht fia predates all of that by several thousand years, though in a landscape this layered, the distance between periods can feel oddly compressed.