A fulacht fia is typically interpreted as an ancient cooking or industrial site: a mound of fire-cracked stone built up over centuries of use, usually found beside a water source, where stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The example at Inchanappa in County Wicklow is not a solitary curiosity but part of a cluster, one of three such monuments identified in close proximity during the same phase of archaeological work.

The site came to light in 2004 during archaeological monitoring carried out under Excavation Licence 04E1334, with O'Donovan noting it in 2007. A full excavation followed in 2005 under a separate licence. As recorded by Mc Loughlin in 2008, the mound is roughly circular, measuring 19.5 metres by 13.5 metres and surviving to a depth of around 0.4 metres. Beneath that spread of burnt and shattered stone, excavators found three troughs and one shallow rectangular feature. A radiocarbon date obtained from material within one of the troughs confirmed that people were using this spot during the Early Bronze Age, roughly four thousand years ago. The presence of three troughs within a single mound hints at repeated, sustained activity across what may have been a considerable span of time, though the precise sequence and purpose of each feature remain open questions.