A circular spread of burnt and fire-cracked stone, roughly eight metres across, marks what was once a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking or processing site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The characteristic mound of blackened, heat-shattered stone that would once have risen from the ground here was levelled around 1985, leaving only the scorched scatter at ground level.

Fulachtaí fia are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet they remain somewhat mysterious in terms of their precise function. The standard interpretation holds that they were used for boiling water, likely for cooking, by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The burnt stone that accumulates as a result of repeated heating and sudden cooling is the telltale signature of the site type, and it survives long after any wooden troughs or organic material have rotted away. The Nohaval example, sitting in damp grazing ground close to a river, fits the typical pattern well; these sites are almost always found near a reliable water source, which the Athnaloingebaine would have provided. The mound itself, before it was levelled in the mid-1980s, would have been the accumulated debris of that process, built up over many uses across what may have been centuries of intermittent activity.