A fulacht fia is broadly understood to have been a cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made hot in a fire. The mounds are found in their thousands across the Irish landscape, usually in low-lying or waterlogged ground, and most date to the Bronze Age. The example at Meeneeshal is, by now, considerably less visible than it once was.

The site was recorded in 1934 by Bowman, who noted two fulachta fiadh on land belonging to a B. O'Doherty in this part of north Cork. That record gives the place a paper existence stretching back nearly a century. What it cannot account for is what happened in the intervening decades. According to local information, the mound was levelled around 1977, leaving only the spread of burnt material that still lies beneath the grass. The deliberate or incidental flattening of earthwork monuments during agricultural improvement was common throughout the twentieth century in Ireland, and this site appears to be one quiet casualty of that process. What survives is less a monument in any conventional sense than a subsurface signature, the scorched and fragmented debris of prehistoric activity that no amount of levelling can entirely remove.