It measures fourteen metres from north to south, seven metres across, and rises just over a metre from the surrounding ground. Its eastern-facing opening, some six metres wide, gives it the shape of a cupped hand turned toward the morning light. Without knowing what you were looking at, you might walk past it without a second thought.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying, waterlogged ground near streams. The form is almost always the same: a trough, typically dug into the earth close to a water source, and a mound built up from the stones used to heat the water. The method involved heating stones in a fire until they were intensely hot, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point. The stones, fractured and spent after repeated heating, were raked aside and accumulated over time into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound. The blackened, charcoal-enriched soil visible in the Curramore mound is the direct residue of those fires, preserved for what are likely to be thousands of years. Most fulachta fiadh in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some are earlier or later. Their proximity to running water was not incidental; a reliable stream was essential to the whole operation, and the one at Curramore still runs along the mound's southern edge.