It is a fulacht fia, one of Ireland's most common yet least understood prehistoric monument types. These are the remains of ancient cooking or processing sites, typically Bronze Age in date, where stones were heated in fire and then plunged into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. The trough itself has long since silted over, but the characteristic crescent of cracked and fire-reddened stone that surrounds it endures in the landscape, sometimes for three or four thousand years.

This particular example, in Glencurran canyon near Creevagh, is notably large, measuring 23 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, with a bank ranging from six to seven metres wide and rising up to two metres on the exterior. The horseshoe opens to the north, backed against the canyon wall, and a spring lies immediately to the east, which is entirely typical of the type; ready access to a water source was a practical necessity. Some very large stones are embedded in the bank alongside the more usual burnt and shattered material. The canyon setting gives the site an enclosed, almost secretive quality, and the uneven, overgrown ground makes the monument difficult to read at a glance. Within roughly a hundred metres there are two further sites of interest: a cashel, the remains of a stone-walled enclosure, to the north-west, and a hut site to the south-west, suggesting this small canyon once supported a more substantial pattern of human activity than its current wildness implies.