It measures just under twenty metres east to west and rises less than a metre above the surrounding ground. To a casual eye it might read as nothing more than a slight rise in the field, partially worn down by time and livestock. But the burnt material that makes up its bulk tells a different story, one reaching back thousands of years.

The mound is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, particularly dating to the Bronze Age. The typical arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, at which point meat could be cooked. The cracked, heat-shattered stones were then discarded, accumulating over repeated use into the horseshoe-shaped or irregular mounds archaeologists still find today. The proximity of this example to a natural spring is entirely characteristic; access to a reliable water source was essential to the whole process. What makes the Cooles example quietly notable is a detail added at some later, unspecified point: a cattle trough has been inserted into the north side of the mound. Whoever put it there presumably found a ready-made hollow or depression useful for a very different kind of animal husbandry, with no awareness, or no particular concern, that they were modifying a monument many centuries old.