These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are essentially ancient cooking places, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone and charcoal-dark soil beside a trough or water source. The method is well understood: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled pit to bring it to a boil, then used to cook meat, and possibly for other purposes including bathing or textile processing. What they tell us about the people who used them, and why so many were built, remains a matter of ongoing debate among archaeologists.

Fulachtaí fia date mostly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some have produced earlier or later dates. They tend to cluster near streams and boggy ground, which is why so many survive, preserved under peat or in poorly drained fields that were never deeply ploughed. The Ballaheen example is recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, published in 1994, which catalogued hundreds of such sites across the county. Beyond its location and type, the available information is sparse.

Access to the site is not currently possible, as it lies within forestry that blocks any approach. This is not unusual for fulachtaí fia in Cork and elsewhere; commercial forestry plantations have covered a considerable number of recorded monuments across Ireland, sometimes protecting them from disturbance but rendering them effectively invisible and unreachable for the foreseeable future.