It rises only about twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground, oval in plan and roughly eight metres across, and it is made almost entirely of burnt and shattered stone. That blackened rubble is the giveaway. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age, and recognised by the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone left behind after centuries of use.

The way a fulacht fia worked was straightforward but effective. A trough was dug into the ground near a water source and lined, sometimes with timber or stone. Rocks were heated in a fire nearby and then dropped into the water-filled trough, bringing it rapidly to a boil. Meat could then be cooked in the heated water, the process repeated as stones cracked and splintered in the heat. Those discarded stones accumulated over time into the mound that survives today. At Dromaneen, the deposit of burnt material runs to around sixty centimetres in depth, visible in section where a drain cuts across the southern and eastern edges of the mound. That drain has also truncated the mound itself, so what remains is an incomplete picture of what was once a more substantial feature. A marshy area lies roughly forty metres to the north-east, consistent with the typical siting of these monuments close to a reliable water supply.