From a distance it reads simply as a low, grass-covered mound sitting at the foot of a natural rise, backing onto boggy rush-grown pasture. Up close, the kidney shape gives it away.

A fulacht fia, sometimes translated as "cooking place of the deer", is the remains of a Bronze Age outdoor cooking site. The typical arrangement involved a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined and filled with water, into which fire-heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The shattered, heat-fractured stones were then raked out and discarded, building up over repeated use into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. The Curries example fits this pattern closely. The mound measures roughly 12.9 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, rising to about 0.7 metres at its highest point on the southern side. It is composed of those characteristic shattered stones set in a charcoal-rich soil, the charcoal being the residue of the fires used to heat them. Between the two "arms" of the kidney shape, on the southern face, there is a shallow depression measuring approximately 2 metres by 1 metre, which most likely marks the position of the original trough. The northern edge of the mound, where it meets the rising ground behind it, stands only 0.25 metres high, giving a clear sense of how the site was tucked into the slope.

The setting itself is telling. Fulachtaí fia are almost invariably found near water or on poorly drained ground, and the flat, wettish, rush-grown pasture bordering this mound to the south would have provided a ready water source. Whether these sites were used primarily for cooking, for bathing, or for some combination of purposes is a question that has occupied archaeologists for decades without a definitive answer. What is not in doubt is that this unassuming hump in a Mayo field represents a place where people repeatedly gathered, lit fires, and boiled water, possibly for centuries, during the Bronze Age.