The mound measures roughly fourteen metres north to south and nearly eleven metres east to west, rising just over half a metre above the surrounding ground. Its opening, about three metres wide, faces northeast. To an untrained eye it might read as a natural rise in the land, but the material beneath the turf tells a different story: layer upon layer of burnt and fire-cracked stone.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The standard interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. The discarded, heat-shattered stones accumulated over time into the characteristic mound, often horseshoe-shaped because they were thrown to either side of the trough. The Knockskavane example is not alone in its townland. A researcher named Bowman, writing in 1934, recorded at least four such sites in the area, and this mound is thought to be one of that group. The clustering of fulachta fiadh in a single townland is not unusual, and may point to repeated or seasonal use of a locality over generations, though the specific reasons one place attracted so many of these sites remain a matter of debate among archaeologists.