It is not one. The mound is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe or crescent-shaped heap of fire-cracked stone and charcoal that accumulated as ancient people repeatedly heated rocks, dropped them into a water-filled trough, and used the resulting hot water for cooking or other purposes. This particular example is semicircular in plan, measuring nearly fourteen metres along its northeast to southwest axis and rising to about one and a half metres at its highest point, which is a reasonable size for the type. The surface is uneven, and the mound appears to have been disturbed at some point, likely during roadworks along the adjacent road.

What makes the Mountkeeffe site especially notable is not the mound itself but the company it keeps. Within a relatively compact stretch of ground, two further fulachtaí fia have been recorded: a second lies roughly eighty metres to the southwest, and a third approximately fifty metres to the southeast. The clustering of these sites is not unique in the Irish landscape, where such monuments can appear in groups in low-lying, wet terrain, but finding three in such close proximity is still striking. Whether they were used simultaneously, seasonally, or across different periods is the kind of question archaeology rarely answers with confidence, but the concentration suggests this marshy corner of north Cork was a place people returned to repeatedly over a long stretch of prehistoric time.