A burnt mound, known in Irish archaeology as a fulacht fiadh, is typically the remains of a Bronze Age cooking or heating site, where stones were repeatedly fired and then plunged into water-filled troughs until they cracked and blackened. Over generations, the discarded fragments accumulated into low mounds, and they are among the most frequently encountered prehistoric features in the Irish landscape, though most pass unnoticed beneath fields and bog.

The Branraduff mound sits in a natural peat basin flanked on its northern and southern edges by eskers, the long gravel ridges left behind by meltwater streams running beneath glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. It was exposed in 2001 and 2002 during construction works for the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme, when a pipe trench roughly 0.9 metres wide cut through 6.8 metres of the deposit, revealing a layer 0.3 metres thick of burnt stone and charcoal. The material extended further still, running under the road to the north and into the verge to the south. Rather than remove it, engineers diverted the pipeline southward into an existing land drain, leaving the mound intact where it lay. A single flint flake was recovered from the burnt layer, and a charcoal sample sent for radiocarbon dating returned a Middle Bronze Age result of 3223 plus or minus 38 BP, placing activity at the site somewhere between 1610 and 1425 BC.