What makes it conspicuous is not its height but its contrast with the flat ground around it, and what makes it significant is what it is made of: a dense accumulation of heat-shattered stones, cracked and fragmented by repeated cycles of heating and quenching in water.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in their thousands across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The general principle is straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, after which food, most likely meat, could be cooked. The spent, fractured stones were discarded to one side, and over generations of use those discarded stones accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe or oval mounds that survive in the landscape today. At Dromline, the mound measures approximately 11.5 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west, and erosion on its western side has exposed the dark brown gritty soil within, packed with those small irregular stones. A slight depression on the northern side may be a remnant trace of the trough itself. Notably, no obvious charcoal was identified in the exposed material, which is sometimes the case where burning took place at a remove from the mound proper. The site is partly covered in briars and whitethorn scrub, which is fairly typical of fulacht fia mounds, which tend to accumulate thorny growth precisely because the disturbed, stony soil discourages other vegetation and grazing animals leave them alone.