These are the traces of what may be a burnt mound, one of the most common yet least-discussed monument types in the Irish landscape.

Burnt mounds are the archaeological fingerprint of a remarkably simple technology. Stones were heated in fire and then plunged into water-filled troughs or pits to boil the water, a method used repeatedly over time until the stones cracked and became useless. The discarded fragments accumulated into mounds, typically horseshoe-shaped, and are found across Ireland in their thousands, most dating to the Bronze Age. At Ballyglass Middle, two surface spreads of this burnt material were recorded in 1999. The first measures roughly 8 metres north-north-west to south-south-east and 5 to 6 metres in the other direction; the second lies just 5 metres to the south-south-east. Whether these represent two separate features or a single levelled mound with overall dimensions of around 15 metres remains uncertain. What complicates, and enriches, the picture is the surrounding context: another burnt mound sits approximately 15 metres to the north-north-west, and yet another has been absorbed into a field boundary roughly 10 metres to the north. Three monuments in such close proximity raises the possibility that this low-lying, water-adjacent ground was returned to repeatedly, over generations or longer, for purposes that archaeologists still debate, cooking, bathing, or industrial processes among them.