The one at Templemary in north Cork is typical in its quiet anonymity: a grass-covered mound of burnt material sitting in pasture, just south of a stream, easy to walk past without a second glance. A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, usually identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone and charcoal that accumulated over repeated use. The association with running water is almost universal among these sites, and this example follows the pattern faithfully.

The mechanics of a fulacht fia are straightforward once explained. Stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, raising the temperature quickly enough to cook meat or, as some researchers have proposed, to process hides, brew ale, or even serve as a form of hot bath. The discarded, fire-cracked stones built up around the trough over time, forming the low spreads that survive today. The Templemary site preserves that accumulation intact beneath its grassy surface, a remnant of repeated activity by people working beside this north Cork stream probably somewhere in the second millennium BC.