Or rather, what was once a mound of charred stones and blackened earth, roughly 23 metres across and rising to about 1.5 metres at its highest point, had by 1987 been absorbed so completely into reclaimed pasture that nothing remained visible at ground level.

The site belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a term used across Ireland for the remains of Bronze Age outdoor cooking places. The typical arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, and cooking meat in the resulting heat. Over time the cracked and spent stones were discarded into a mound nearby, and it is these distinctive crescents and horseshoes of fire-shattered rock, often dark with charcoal, that archaeologists recognise across the Irish landscape. The Craan example was formally recorded on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, noted then as a mound of charred stones and black earth. Its position, in a slight dip on an east-facing slope with a small stream running north to south about 100 metres to the east, fits the pattern well: fulachtaí fia are almost always found close to a reliable water source, and low or slightly marshy ground seems to have been preferred.

By the time anyone looked again in 1987, agricultural improvement had done its work. The mound had been levelled into the surrounding pasture, leaving no surface trace. The site is a reminder of how much of the prehistoric record is not dramatically buried or dramatically preserved, but simply gone, folded quietly back into the working landscape.