The site belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a type found in enormous numbers across Ireland and typically understood as an outdoor cooking place where water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough. Over time, the cracked and discarded stones accumulated into a low mound, usually horseshoe-shaped, beside a water source. Here, close to the northern bank of the River Robe, that mound had already been levelled at some point before its discovery, leaving an oval spread roughly seven and a half metres by four and a half metres, and only about twenty centimetres deep.

The site came to light in 1994 during the Ballinrobe Sewerage Disposal Scheme and was fully excavated under licence that same year. The mound itself was composed of charcoal-rich soil and heat-shattered stones, the characteristic signature of repeated high-temperature burning. Beneath the southern end lay evidence of a possible hearth, and beneath the northern end a natural depression in the limestone bedrock, filled with dark brown soil, which may have functioned as the cooking trough. The finds recovered were modest but telling: a chert barbed and tanged arrowhead, several flint pieces, a possible hone stone used for sharpening blades, and a sheep tooth. A single flint flake came from the darker layer beneath the mound itself, hinting at activity predating even the main period of use. Together, the assemblage points to a site that was worked, and periodically returned to, during the Bronze Age, tucked against a river that would have supplied the water essential to the whole process.