The association is not accidental. A fulacht fia, the type of monument found in its thousands across Ireland, is generally understood to have functioned as a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The mound that forms at such a site is essentially the accumulated debris of that repeated process, a heap of thermally shattered rock that builds up over many uses. Here, burnt stones scattered around the nearby spring suggest the water source itself was part of the original activity.

The mound at Knockans is semi-circular in plan, measuring fifteen metres east to west and thirteen metres north to south, and rising to a maximum height of somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 metres. Some stone facing survives on its south-eastern slope. What makes the site a little more layered is the presence of a smaller, subcircular cairn of unburnt stones at the eastern end of the mound, measuring roughly 2.8 metres by 2.2 metres, with several upright stones along its eastern edge reaching up to 0.48 metres in height. This cairn appears to be a later addition, unconnected to the original Bronze Age use of the site, and a low wall extending northward from it seems to be relatively modern in date, perhaps a field boundary or enclosure associated with post-medieval land use. The site was noted on Tim Robinson's 1977 map of the area, placing it in the record before more systematic survey work was carried out.