About twelve metres across and barely half a metre high, it is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying, waterlogged ground close to streams or rivers. The name, loosely translated from Irish, is traditionally associated with the cooking pits of hunters or travelling bands, though their exact social function is still debated by archaeologists. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, and using that heat to cook meat. The crescent or horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at such sites is usually the accumulated debris of those fire-cracked and shattered stones, discarded over repeated use.

The proximity to the Brewery River is characteristic rather than coincidental. Fulachtaí fia, the plural form, are almost always found near a reliable water source, which was essential to the whole process. The site at Maugh fits that pattern exactly, sitting in low pasture where the ground would have provided both access to water and a suitably level working area. The mound here has become overgrown over time, its original shape softened but still legible as a slight rise in the field. While the site itself has not been excavated and its precise date is unknown, fulachtaí fia in Ireland generally cluster in the Bronze Age, roughly between 1500 and 500 BC, making this unobtrusive bump in a Cork field potentially three thousand years old or more.