The cause is not poor soil or unusual drainage but rather a spread of burnt and fire-cracked stone roughly 21 metres north to south and 17 metres east to west, the buried residue of a fulacht fia. These are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, low horseshoe-shaped mounds of shattered stone, charcoal, and ash that were built up over repeated episodes of heating stones in a fire and plunging them into a water-filled trough. The heat transferred to the water was enough to cook meat, process hides, or possibly serve purposes we have not yet fully understood. The tell-tale signs at the surface, stunted or discoloured grass above the mineral-rich debris, are often the only visible clue that one exists at all.

Until recently, there was rather more to see here. Local knowledge holds that a mound roughly six feet high once marked the site, but it was levelled in March 1984, leaving the subsurface spread of burnt material as the sole remaining evidence of use. The date of that levelling is a reminder of how many such monuments disappeared quietly during the latter decades of the twentieth century, removed by agricultural machinery before the pace of field survey could keep up. A second fulacht fia lies approximately 120 metres to the north-east, and the pairing is not unusual. These sites often cluster, suggesting repeated return to the same landscape over generations, drawn perhaps by proximity to water, which the troughs would have required in quantity.