The mound measures roughly fifteen metres north to south and nearly fourteen metres east to west, with its open end facing east, and it belongs to a class of monument that appears in enormous numbers across the Irish landscape: the fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is understood to be a cooking site of the Bronze Age, though debate about its precise function continues among archaeologists. The basic process involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, and using that heat to cook meat. The stones, once shattered by the repeated thermal shock, were discarded to the sides of the trough, gradually building up the characteristic crescentic mound that survives at sites like this one. When the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey recorded this example in 1987, surveyors noted the mound clearly in the wet pasture and identified a concentration of rush growth marking the area of the ancient trough, rushes being reliable indicators of persistently damp or disturbed ground. The trough itself, typically a timber-lined or stone-lined pit, would originally have been sunk into the earth at the centre of that open horseshoe.