Beneath that spread of turf, however, lies a scatter of burnt and heat-shattered stone, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape.

Fulachtaí fia, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally understood to be Bronze Age cooking sites, dating broadly from around 1500 BC onwards, though some examples fall outside that range. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the ground near a water source, lined with timber or stone, and filled with water. Stones were heated in a nearby fire and dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil. Over repeated use, the cracked and spent stones accumulated into a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough. The proximity to a stream at Templemary fits this pattern almost exactly; moving water close at hand was a practical necessity, making low-lying, well-watered pasture precisely the kind of ground where these sites tend to cluster. What the site was used to cook, or whether cooking was its sole purpose, remains a matter of ongoing debate among archaeologists, with proposals ranging from textile processing to brewing.