It is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age, and consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone surrounding what would once have been a trough. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled pit, bringing it rapidly to the boil, most likely for cooking. The question of exactly what was being cooked, and by whom, has never been fully settled.

This particular example is modest in scale, measuring roughly 17.5 metres east to west and 12 metres north to south, with its characteristic opening facing north-west. The surrounding bank is broad, around four metres wide, and still rises to between 0.6 and 0.9 metres above the surrounding ground despite millennia of weathering and encroaching vegetation. Internal facing stones, standing between 0.4 and one metre high, remain visible along the northern to western arc, suggesting the original structure was carefully built rather than simply heaped up. What makes the site sit slightly apart from a lone cooking mound is its context: it lies within a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries evidence of repeated human activity across different eras, the fulacht fia being only one layer in a much longer pattern of land use along this stretch of the Rathborney River valley.