The example at Scartbarry, in County Cork, sits in tillage on a gently sloping, north-west-facing hillside, roughly five metres east of a stream. It measures thirty-one metres on a north-west to south-east axis and fourteen metres across, a substantial spread of heat-shattered stones mixed through charcoal-enriched soil, the physical residue of repeated high-temperature activity carried out over what was likely a considerable period of time.

Burnt mounds, known in Irish archaeology as fulachtaí fia, are typically associated with Bronze Age cooking or food processing, though theories about their use also include bathing, textile production, and other heat-dependent tasks. The working principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough or pit to bring the water rapidly to the boil. The stones, cracked and useless after a few cycles of heating and quenching, were discarded to the side, accumulating gradually into the crescent or horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive today. Their proximity to water, as here at Scartbarry, is almost universal. This particular mound sits within an enclosure, suggesting it formed part of a wider complex of activity on the same ground, though the relationship between the two features is not fully resolved. At the time of survey, overgrowth along the western edge made it impossible to determine whether the spread of material continued all the way to the stream bank.