It is a burnt mound, one of thousands scattered across the Irish landscape, and the type is strange enough to deserve a moment's attention. These features, known in Irish archaeology as fulachtaí fia, are the remains of prehistoric cooking or industrial sites where stones were heated in fire and then plunged into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. The process left behind crescentic or oval mounds of cracked, fire-shattered stone mixed with charcoal, and it happened repeatedly enough, across enough centuries, that burnt mounds are among the most commonly recorded prehistoric monuments in Ireland.

The mound at Cloonakeemoge measures roughly ten to twelve metres north to south and about six metres east to west, though its edges are indistinct on the southwestern and northwestern sides. A modern agricultural drain has cut through the northeastern edge, and it is in the exposed face of that drain that the site becomes most legible: a layer of burnt stone and charcoal running to a depth of around 0.7 metres. The relationship between the mound and water is also visible in the historical record. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 shows a pool immediately to the east of the site, now drained away. That pool would have been central to the mound's original function, and its proximity is consistent with the pattern seen at burnt mound sites across Ireland, which are almost invariably found close to a natural water source.