Yet it is composed almost entirely of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the accumulated debris of repeated prehistoric cooking or industrial activity spanning, in some cases, centuries. This is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically identified by exactly this kind of horseshoe-shaped or mounded spread of shattered stone beside a water source. The mound here measures roughly twelve metres north to south and eight and a half metres east to west, a solid if unremarkable example of a monument type that was once so commonplace it has become one of Ireland's most frequently recorded prehistoric features.

The site's relationship with water is where things become more interesting. A spring once lay to the west of the mound, and the logic of that pairing is central to how fulachta fiadh are understood to have functioned. The standard interpretation holds that water was drawn into a trough, stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into the water to bring it rapidly to the boil, and the cracked, spent stones were discarded into the growing mound nearby. The spring at Meeneeshal was drained around 1985, severing what had been, for thousands of years before that, the site's essential connection to the ground. The mound was recorded by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, who noted it alongside a second fulacht fia on land then belonging to a B. O'Doherty. That pair of monuments on the same landholding is itself a small reminder of how densely these sites once punctuated the Irish countryside.