The one at Tullyvoghan in County Clare is a quiet example of a type that appears almost everywhere: low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone, typically found near water, and dating most often to the Bronze Age. The name translates roughly as "wild deer cooking place," though what exactly went on at these sites has been debated for decades. The dominant theory holds that stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and used for cooking or food processing. Other researchers have proposed uses ranging from bathing and textile working to brewing, and the honest answer is that the evidence supports several of these possibilities at once.

The Tullyvoghan site sits in a part of Clare that would have been well populated during prehistory, a county whose limestone landscape preserves an unusual density of early monuments. The fulacht fia as a monument type tends to cluster in low-lying, boggy ground where water is close to the surface, which is precisely the kind of terrain that also aids their survival; the peaty, waterlogged soil protects the charcoal and shattered stone that archaeologists use to date and interpret them. Radiocarbon dates from comparable sites across Ireland cluster broadly between 1500 and 500 BC, placing them in the middle to later Bronze Age, though earlier and later examples are known. The cracked and reddened stones that form the mound are the debris of repeated heating and sudden immersion, discarded after each use.