That near-invisibility is itself part of the story. What likely lies beneath the surface here is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in abundance across Ireland, typically consisting of a burnt-stone mound and a water-filled trough in which stones were heated and dropped to bring liquid to the boil. The mound at Kiltoom measures roughly eight metres north to south and six metres east to west, modest even by the standards of a monument class that was never designed to impress.

The site sits in flat, poorly drained pasture on the boundary between Kiltoom and Coolure Demesne, with the Yellow River tracing the western and northern edges of the land. That soggy setting is characteristic; fulachtaí fia cluster near water and wetland, since a ready supply was essential to their function. A ring-barrow, a circular burial monument of the Bronze Age, lies ninety metres to the west, hinting at a broader pattern of prehistoric activity in this stretch of the midlands. What complicates the picture at Kiltoom is a set of cultivation ridges, each around 1.2 metres wide and running northwest to southeast, which cross the surface of the mound. These ridges, probably the result of later agricultural ploughing, may have disturbed or simply buried the eastern side of the monument, where the trough is most likely to have been. Fifty metres to the south, in an adjoining field surrounded by reeds and standing water, three further low mounds of similar height raise the possibility that the area contains multiple cooking sites rather than just one.