The mound consists of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the characteristic debris of a fulacht fia, and it sits in marshy ground immediately south-west of a spring that has since been drained away. That vanished spring is the key to understanding why anyone camped or worked here in the first place.

A fulacht fia, sometimes translated loosely as a cooking place of the deer, is one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, found in the hundreds across the country and concentrated particularly in Munster. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. Over repeated use, the stones would shatter from the thermal shock, and the discarded fragments accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped or spread mounds that survive today. The site at Kilmacurrane follows that familiar pattern, positioned as these sites almost always are beside a reliable water source. The spring that once fed this particular spot is gone now, drained at some point in the improvement of the surrounding land, but its former presence is still legible in the marshy character of the ground and in the mound of blackened, broken stone that marks where the heat and water once met.