It is a fulacht fia, one of thousands scattered across the Irish countryside, and one of the more curious categories of prehistoric monument the island has to offer. The term, sometimes rendered as fulacht fiadh, refers to a type of ancient cooking or heating site, typically Bronze Age in origin, identifiable by the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered, fire-cracked stone that accumulates around a central trough over repeated use. The basic principle involves heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled pit to bring the water to a boil, a method that leaves behind enormous quantities of burnt and fragmented stone.

The Skagh example measures roughly fifteen metres on its longer north-northwest to south-southeast axis and just over eleven and a half metres across. The southern two-thirds of the site form a low, flat-topped mound of burnt material, while the northern third retains the classic horseshoe shape, standing around one metre ten centimetres high, with the open end of the horseshoe facing south. That opening would originally have faced the trough, the working area of the site. The overall form is consistent with what archaeologists encounter repeatedly across Cork and the wider country, though the relative preservation of the horseshoe element here gives a clearer sense of the original structure than many comparable sites, which have been reduced to little more than a spread of dark, scorched earth and fragmented stone.