These are fulachta fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough or pit used to boil water by dropping fire-heated stones into it. The stones crack and shatter with repeated heating and cooling, and it is exactly these low mounds of fire-shattered stone and upcast gravel that mark the two sites here, still visible in cross-section at the base of a three-metre bank of uncut peat.

Radiocarbon dating of ling charcoal recovered from one of the pits places activity here at around 3400 years before present, give or take ninety years, which puts it roughly in the Middle Bronze Age. That date comes from work published by Mitchell in 1989, and it places these two small pits, each roughly half a metre long, within a period when fulachta fiadh were in widespread use across the Irish landscape. The bog has preserved them well, as it tends to do with organic and combustion material, though the cutaway has also exposed them to whatever the Atlantic weather brings in off the coast. The piles of gravel and broken stone beside each pit are the accumulated waste of many cooking episodes, the spent material raked or thrown aside after each use.