These low, horseshoe-shaped mounds, typically found near water, are the accumulated debris of repeated open-air cooking. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, then using that heat to cook meat. Over time, the cracked and fire-shattered stones were raked aside and piled up, forming the distinctive mound that archaeologists recognise today. The word fulacht, loosely translated, relates to cooking or the act of roasting, and fiadh may refer to wild deer or wild game, though the precise meaning has been debated for generations.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded, yet they remain genuinely mysterious in several respects. While the cooking interpretation is widely accepted, some researchers have proposed additional uses, including the processing of hides, brewing, or bathing. They date predominantly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some sites show earlier or later use. Their presence beside Clareabbey is a reminder that this ground was significant long before the Augustinian canons established their house here in the medieval period. The abbey itself was founded in the thirteenth century, but the fulacht fia speaks to a community using this same riverside landscape more than two millennia before that.