This particular spread, found on the western bank of a stream in Castlelands townland in County Cork, belongs to a class of prehistoric site known as a burnt mound. The term refers to a distinctive accumulation of heat-shattered stone and charcoal-rich earth, the debris left behind when people repeatedly heated stones in a fire and dropped them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. Hundreds of such sites are known across Ireland, and they are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains debated. Cooking is the most widely accepted explanation, though uses ranging from communal bathing to textile processing have also been proposed.

This example came to light in 2000 during topsoil stripping ahead of the construction of the Ballincollig to Ballineen gas pipeline, one of those infrastructure projects that, frustratingly and usefully, tends to cut straight through the buried past. Excavation by Tobin recorded a spread measuring 14.02 metres east to west and 7.5 metres north to south, surviving to a depth of 0.8 metres. Two later drainage channels, running roughly northwest to southeast, had been cut through the deposit, one of them lined with stone. No associated trough or hearth was found within the excavated area, though the excavator suggested these features likely survive to the south, closer to the stream, which would have been the obvious water source. More striking still, two further possible burnt mounds were identified nearby, one roughly fifty metres to the west and another about a hundred and ten metres to the east, suggesting that this part of the Cork landscape was a site of repeated or sustained prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated episode.