It was, in all likelihood, the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, the discarded residue of a process in which stones were heated and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Thousands of these sites survive across the island, though many, like this one, have not.

The Killavarilly mound was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1935, marked as a circular feature in what was then, as now, agricultural ground. Local accounts described it as being somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet in diameter and around three feet high, a modest but not insignificant presence in the landscape. That presence did not last. Around 1984, the mound was levelled, most probably in the course of routine farm improvement work of the kind that quietly erased a great many low earthworks across Ireland during the latter decades of the twentieth century. What had survived for potentially thousands of years was gone within a season.

There is nothing to see at Killavarilly today. The site is noted here not as a place to visit but as a record of something that existed, was mapped, was described in living memory, and then disappeared. The mound's brief presence in local recollection, its dimensions passed on precisely enough to be written down, is itself a small piece of the story.