It measures roughly nine metres long, eleven and a half wide, and rises about a metre from the surrounding ground. What fills it is not earth in any ordinary sense, but burnt and fire-cracked material, the accumulated residue of repeated heating, the physical signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland. The general understanding is that these sites involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to boil the water, though exactly what that boiling was used for, cooking, textile processing, bathing, or something else entirely, remains a matter of debate. The cracked, heat-shattered stones were raked out and piled to the sides of the trough over time, forming the characteristic horseshoe shape, with the open end typically facing a water source. At Currahaly, that opening faces south-east and is about four metres wide, the trough long gone but the mound persisting as a metre-high arc of discarded burnt stone. What makes this particular site more than a solitary curiosity is its company: it belongs to a cluster of five such monuments in the immediate area, which suggests repeated, possibly sustained prehistoric activity in this part of mid Cork rather than a single isolated episode.