That mound is gone now, levelled by agricultural drainage, but a spread of burnt material still marks the spot where the feature once stood. What remains is, in archaeological terms, a ghost of a site: enough to confirm something was there, not quite enough to reconstruct it fully.

A fulacht fia, to use the Irish term, is a type of ancient burnt mound found across Ireland and Britain, typically dating to the Bronze Age, though some examples are earlier or later. The usual interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking sites, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The process fractures the stones, and it is precisely this accumulation of fire-cracked, heat-shattered rock that gives the mounds their distinctive dark, scorched character. The kidney or horseshoe shape is typical of the class, forming as material was thrown back from a central trough over repeated use. At Ballynora, the proximity to a well fits the pattern well: a reliable water source was essential to the whole operation. The site was recorded by Walsh in 1985 and later included in the published Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, by which point it had already been disturbed by land drainage associated with tillage farming.