It measures nine metres by four, rises to less than a metre at its highest point, and is composed almost entirely of heat-shattered stone. To a passing eye it is simply a slight rise in the ground. To an archaeologist it is a burnt mound, a class of prehistoric site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, and this particular example is far from alone.

Burnt mounds are the accumulated debris of fulachta fiadh, a term sometimes translated loosely as "cooking places of the deer." The typical interpretation is that these sites were used for boiling water, achieved by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The stones crack and fragment with the thermal shock, and over repeated use they pile up into the characteristic low, horseshoe-shaped or rectangular mounds seen across the Irish landscape. What makes the Abbey site particularly striking is its density. Immediately to the north-west lies a fulacht fia, another lies roughly fifty metres to the north, and a second burnt mound sits only ten metres to the south-west. The spring wells that emerge naturally from this slope would have made it an ideal location, providing a reliable water source without the need to carry or channel water from elsewhere. A small spring well enclosed by low drystone walling survives just two metres north of the mound, a detail that underlines how closely these sites were tied to the local hydrology of the land.