It faces south, its four-metre-wide opening giving it the look of something that once held a purpose rather than merely accumulated. It lies approximately thirty metres south-east of a spring, a proximity that is not coincidental.

This is a fulacht fia, a class of monument found in considerable numbers across Ireland and dating predominantly from the Bronze Age, though some examples span a wider range of periods. The name, loosely translated, refers to a cooking place, and the prevailing interpretation is that these sites were used for boiling water, most likely by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The stones crack and fragment with repeated heating and cooling, and it is this shattered, fire-reddened material that gradually accumulates into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. The closeness of a water source, in this case a spring, was essential to the process, which explains why fulachta fiadh are so frequently found in low-lying or waterlogged terrain. What exactly was being cooked, or whether cooking was always the primary function, remains a matter of some debate among archaeologists; brewing, textile processing, and bathing have all been proposed as alternatives or additional uses.