It measures roughly nineteen metres east to west and just over sixteen metres north to south, rising to a modest sixty centimetres at its highest point. That unassuming profile is typical of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a trough of water to bring it to boiling point. Over time, the discarded, fire-cracked stone accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today. This one sits on a slight north-north-westward slope, and the marshy ground around it is no accident; ready access to water was essential to the whole process.

The site was potentially identified by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, who included a fulacht fia at Rossanean in an appendix to his 1954 study of these sites, a body of work that did much to establish how fulachtaí fia functioned and how widely they were distributed across the Irish landscape. O'Kelly's research remains foundational to the field. A separate burnt spread lies approximately seventy-five metres to the north, raising the possibility that prehistoric activity in this part of Kerry was not limited to a single episode or location, though the relationship between the two features is not fully resolved.