The spread of burnt material around it identifies it as a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland. The typical arrangement involved a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined and sunk into the ground, filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those stones, once spent, were piled alongside the trough, and it is these characteristic mounds of shattered, blackened rock that survive in the landscape today, sometimes for three or four thousand years.

The site appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1938, recorded as an oval mound, which suggests it was visible and distinct enough at that point to be noted by surveyors. By the time fieldwork for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork was carried out, the picture was more complicated. The mound was partly overgrown with vegetation, and the northern end had been ploughed over, removing or disturbing whatever archaeology survived there. Ploughing is one of the most common ways these sites are gradually erased; the stony spread is broken up and worked into the soil across successive seasons, leaving little beyond a faint discolouration or a scatter of heat-shattered stone.