Roughly ten metres across, the feature is slightly dished at its centre and revetted, meaning its edge is cut back and reinforced against the slope of the hillside to the east, while the ground falls away more gradually toward a stand of trees to the west. To a passing eye it might register as nothing more than an oddly regular hollow, but its form is the fingerprint of charcoal production.

Charcoal-making platforms of this kind, sometimes called hearths or pitsteads, were constructed to provide a level surface on which a carefully stacked mound of timber, covered in turf, earth, or bracken, could smoulder slowly over several days with minimal airflow. The result was charcoal, a fuel far more efficient than raw wood and essential for ironworking, lime-burning, and various other industries that depended on sustained, intense heat. The sites are typically found in areas where both woodland and a demand for fuel converged, and they tend to survive precisely because they were cut into slopes and then left alone, their altered ground level preserving the shape long after the last fire went cold. Kerry's uplands, with their combination of managed woodland and early industrial activity, provided conditions in which such platforms were regularly established.