It measures roughly eleven metres by eight, rising no more than seventy centimetres at its highest point. On its northern side, a grass-covered trench cuts through it on an east-west axis. This is a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, and yet one of the least understood. The term, loosely translated as "cooking place of the deer," refers to the remains of an ancient outdoor cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The characteristic horseshoe or oval mound is formed from the accumulated debris of those shattered stones, discarded after each use.

What makes this particular site quietly compelling is not what it contains but what surrounds it. Within a radius of roughly two hundred and twenty metres, three other fulachta fia have been recorded in the same valley, two to the south-southwest and one to the north-northwest. Whether they were in use at the same time, or represent successive episodes of activity returning to a favoured patch of wet, low-lying ground over generations or centuries, is not known. The trough, the central feature of any fulacht fia, where the actual heating and cooking took place, leaves no clear trace here; the trench cutting through the northern side of the mound may have disturbed or obscured whatever remained of it. Marshy ground was often deliberately chosen for these sites, since a natural or dug hollow in waterlogged terrain would hold water without the need for a sealed container.