The one at Teeronea in County Clare is a quiet example of a type that tends to attract more questions than answers. A fulacht fia is essentially a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone beside a trough, often timber-lined, dug into the ground near a water source. The stones would be heated in a fire and dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a method efficient enough to cook large quantities of meat. The charred, fire-cracked stone, discarded after each use, gradually accumulated into the distinctive low mounds that survive today.

Most fulachtaí fia date from the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some were in use during the Iron Age and even into the early medieval period. They are found almost everywhere in Ireland where waterlogged ground and a nearby stream or spring could supply the necessary water. Clare has a considerable number of them, scattered across bog margins and low-lying fields, and Teeronea is one such location where the ground still holds this faint trace of repeated, practical activity carried out over what may have been generations. The purpose of these sites has been debated at length; cooking remains the most widely accepted explanation, though uses related to bathing, textile processing, or other communal activities have also been proposed.