The site belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a type of burnt mound found in great numbers across Ireland and Britain. The general interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, and used to cook meat. They date most commonly to the Bronze Age, though examples span a wide range of periods.

This particular site came to light during the construction of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline, when the work exposed what was described in a 1983 report by Sleeman as a spread of charcoal and burnt stones, probably part of a fulacht fiadh. The location fits the pattern well. Fulachtaí fia are typically found close to water, and this one lies roughly a hundred metres west of a channelised stream running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east. That proximity to a reliable water source was likely the reason someone chose this spot in the first place. The pipeline corridor, cutting a long straight line through the Irish countryside, incidentally became one of the more productive routes for encountering buried archaeology that had never been formally recorded.