What survives is modest by any measure: a spread of blackened earth and fire-cracked stone, roughly seven and a half metres across and only fifteen centimetres high at its tallest point. Yet even in this diminished form, it is immediately recognisable to those who know what to look for.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the accumulated debris left behind after repeated episodes of a particular prehistoric cooking technique. The usual method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough, bringing the water to a boil quickly enough to cook meat. The stones, stressed by repeated heating and sudden cooling, eventually shattered, and the broken fragments were piled to one side along with scorched soil. Over centuries, these dumps built up into the low, kidney-shaped or oval mounds that still appear across Irish fields today. When the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey recorded this example in 1985, the mound retained its characteristic colouring and material, though the trough itself, which would originally have been a timber-lined or stone-lined pit, left no detectable trace. The eastern edge of the mound sits up against a field drain and fence, features of the modern agricultural landscape that have quietly hemmed it in without entirely erasing it.