It measures roughly five metres east to west and just over three metres north to south, rising no more than forty centimetres above the surrounding terrain. A few large, friable stones break the surface, and that is more or less all a casual observer would notice. Yet this modest hump is almost certainly a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a fire.

The Parknabinnia example sits along a northeast-to-southwest mound wall that forms part of a much larger ancient field system in the area. That broader landscape context is significant. Rather than standing in isolation, this site is one component of an organised prehistoric environment, layered with further complexity in the form of nearby cairns, the stone mounds that typically mark Bronze Age burials. One cairn abuts the fulacht fia to the northeast, and another sits roughly a hundred metres to the north-northeast. A later enclosure immediately to the northwest appears to overlie the fulacht fia itself, suggesting that later peoples continued to use and reshape this part of the landscape long after the cooking site fell out of use, without necessarily recognising or caring what lay beneath. Jones and Walsh noted the site in 1996, placing it within this dense and still only partially understood archaeological terrain.