It measures roughly four metres north to south and three metres east to west, and beneath the heather lies a scatter of burnt stone fragments embedded in black soil. What makes it quietly odd is that nobody is entirely sure what it is, or whether it is even where it started.

The site belongs to a family of prehistoric monuments known as fulachtaí fia, the plural of fulacht fia. These are ancient cooking or heating sites, typically Bronze Age in origin, formed by repeatedly heating stones in a fire and plunging them into water-filled troughs. The stones crack and shatter in the process, and over time the discarded fragments accumulate into the characteristic low, horseshoe-shaped mounds that archaeologists still find beside streams and marshy ground across Ireland. The mound at Carrowgarve fits that general picture, but its small size and disturbed appearance raise the possibility that the material has been displaced, perhaps even spread from a more substantial fulacht fia that lies just twelve metres to the north. What survives here may be the scattered remnant of something that was partly destroyed, rather than an intact monument in its own right. It is not alone in any case: the Fiddaunglass stream, a tributary of the River Deel, has a linear cluster of at least six such sites strung along its course, suggesting that this particular stretch of water was used repeatedly, and probably over a long period, by people who knew exactly what the stream could offer them.