No mound, no hollow, no trace of scorched stone breaks the turf to hint at what is underneath. These are fulachta fia, a type of site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated over repeated episodes of heating water, usually by dropping hot stones into a trough. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in the country, yet at Coan they leave no mark at all on the landscape above them.

The cluster was identified by Prendergast, recorded in the Ordnance Survey's Kilkenny Records in 1977, and all five sites sit in close proximity to a spring well on a terrace to the north of the Dinin river valley, on the western side of a small stream valley. The association with a water source is entirely typical; fulachta fia are almost always found near reliable supplies of fresh water, which would have been essential to whatever activity, most likely cooking or food processing, took place at them. Having five grouped around a single spring is less common, and suggests the location was returned to regularly, perhaps over a considerable period of time.

Because none of the five sites are visible at ground level, a visit to this particular spot offers little in the way of surface archaeology. The interest lies partly in that absence itself, a reminder that the Irish landscape holds enormous amounts of the past entirely out of sight, legible only through survey and excavation rather than the eye.