This is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish countryside. The term refers to a Bronze Age cooking site, typically identified by its characteristic horseshoe or oval mound of burnt stone, the discarded residue of a process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Thousands survive across Ireland, often in low-lying or marshy ground, and most go unnoticed by anyone who has not been told what to look for.

The remains at Gurteenroe consist of two distinct concentrations of burnt material, now separated by a field fence running north to south. On the eastern side of the fence, an oval mound measures roughly ten metres by eight metres and rises only about twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground, the kind of subtle rise that registers as a slight unevenness underfoot rather than anything obviously artificial. On the western side, a broader spread of burnt stone extends approximately nine metres by sixteen metres, lower and less defined. A deep drain has been cut along the eastern side of the fence, which may have further disturbed the original profile of the site. The fence itself, cutting straight across the monument, is a reminder of how routinely these ancient features have been absorbed into working farmland over the centuries, the field boundaries of one era laid down without ceremony across the archaeology of another.