What lies here is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least-visited categories of prehistoric monument in Ireland. The form is distinctive: a horseshoe or oval mound of fire-cracked and burnt stone, built up over repeated use around a central trough. The prevailing theory is that water was brought to the boil by dropping heated stones into the trough, the stones shattering and discolouring in the process until they were raked out and the mound gradually grew. At Abbey, that mound measures 13.3 metres north to south and 9.2 metres east to west, with a low, grass-covered bank of burnt stone enclosing a small central trough just 2.4 metres by 1.4 metres. Modest in scale, but the accumulated labour it represents is considerable.

The site sits on rough grazing land peppered with outcropping rock and fed by numerous small spring wells, which matters more than it might first appear. Proximity to a reliable water source was not incidental to where a fulacht fia was built; it was the whole point. Here, springs emerge from the ground immediately to the northwest of the mound and from the base of low rock outcrops to the north. The site was recorded, if somewhat vaguely, on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842 and again in the 1915 edition, marked simply as a small mound. What makes this particular location more striking is the density of related monuments nearby. Another fulacht fia lies approximately 60 metres to the south, and two further burnt mounds are clustered around 50 metres to the southwest. This concentration suggests the area was in sustained, repeated use, drawing people back to the same water sources across what was likely a span of centuries during the Bronze Age.