It is just over a metre tall, nearly seventeen metres across, and has a narrow opening of about one metre facing northeast. To a passing walker it might look like a natural rise in the ground, perhaps an old field boundary or some forgotten earthwork. It is, in fact, the accumulated debris of prehistoric cooking, spread across the landscape and left more or less untouched for thousands of years.

The site is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, particularly near water sources. The standard interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking sites, typically Bronze Age in date, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. Over repeated use, the stones cracked and shattered and were swept aside, slowly building up the characteristic crescent-shaped mound around the trough. The proximity to the stream at Glenacarney fits this pattern precisely. The site was recorded as part of a cluster, with a researcher named Bowman noting as far back as 1934 that there were probably four such monuments within the same townland, suggesting the area saw sustained use over time rather than a single isolated episode.