A fulacht fia is a type of Bronze Age cooking or processing site, typically consisting of a trough, a hearth, and a mound of heat-shattered stone accumulated over years of use. Hot rocks were dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil, and the cracked, fire-reddened fragments were thrown aside, building up over time into the horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive in the landscape today. At Glantane, the burnt material runs for roughly fourteen metres along the line of the drain and extends approximately six metres to the northwest, continuing beneath the grass.

The site came to light not through any planned excavation but through the ordinary agricultural work of digging a drain in boggy ground. Waterlogged, low-lying areas are exactly where fulachtaí fia tend to cluster; the boggy conditions that make them inconvenient for farming also help preserve the organic and burnt material within them. What the Glantane drain exposed is a cross-section of that accumulation, the charred stone and blackened soil that are the characteristic signature of these sites across Ireland, of which many hundreds are recorded in Cork alone.