The one at Deshure in County Cork is typical of the type in its quiet anonymity: a low, grass-covered mound of burnt material, roughly half a metre high, sitting on a south-south-east-facing pasture slope with nothing to announce its age or purpose.

A fulacht fia, the term used in medieval Irish sources for these features, is generally understood to be the debris left behind by repeated episodes of fire-heating stones and plunging them into water-filled troughs, most likely for cooking. The process is simple but leaves a distinctive signature: the stones crack and fragment with thermal shock, and the resulting burnt, heat-shattered material accumulates over time into a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound. Most examples date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some have produced earlier or later dates. The south-facing slope at Deshure would have offered reasonable drainage and exposure, practical considerations that seem to have guided the choice of site in many cases across the country.