A fulacht fia, the term used for a class of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland, once sat in boggy ground here in mid Cork, its characteristic mound of burnt and shattered stone marking a spot where people had worked with fire and water, probably during the Bronze Age. Fulachtaí fia typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-cracked stone surrounding a pit or trough, where water was heated by dropping fire-reddened stones into it. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, yet the Coollicka example was already reduced to near-invisibility before modern scholarship gave it much attention.

When P. J. Hartnett recorded the site in 1939, he described a mound that was horseshoe-shaped, with its opening facing to the north-west. Lifting the turf layer revealed the diagnostic signature of these sites: black, burnt stones, discoloured and fractured by repeated heating and sudden immersion. It was a brief but precise observation, capturing the monument at a moment when it was still legible. Drainage works carried out at some later point levelled the site entirely, and what Hartnett described no longer exists above ground.