The grass cover makes it impossible to gauge the full extent of what lies beneath, but the signs are consistent with what archaeologists call a burnt mound, a type of site found in the hundreds across the Irish countryside, often near water or low-lying wet ground.

Burnt mounds are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain relatively obscure to the general public. They are thought to represent outdoor cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a method suited to cooking large joints of meat. The repeated heating and quenching of the stones causes them to crack and fragment, and over time the discarded pieces accumulate into a characteristic mound, stained dark by organic material and ash. The Ballaheen example sits on a slope overlooking a marshy area, which fits the pattern well; proximity to a reliable water source, even a boggy one, would have been essential to the whole process. The site was recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 5, published in 2009.