It measures roughly eleven metres north to south and ten metres east to west, and to a casual eye it might register as nothing more than a gentle rise in the ground. Beneath the surface, however, lies a layer of burnt stones and charcoal fragments, the characteristic signature of a burnt mound, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological record. Burnt mounds, known in Irish as fulacht fiadh, are thought to date primarily from the Bronze Age, and are generally interpreted as cooking or food-processing sites where stones were heated in fire and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil. The cracked and fire-shattered stones were then discarded in a heap nearby, gradually accumulating into the low mounds that survive today.

This particular site came to light in February 2016, during archaeological monitoring of groundwork associated with a private forestry plantation on the island of Illanteige East. Two parallel north-south trenches, each roughly a metre wide and cut to a depth of around half a metre, were machine-dug approximately 6.7 metres apart. When archaeologists examined the exposed section faces, they found the burnt layer running through both cuts, sitting just beneath the sod and topsoil at a depth of between ten and forty centimetres. The discovery was communicated by Angela Wallace in March 2016. Once recorded, the trenches were backfilled and the mound was designated for exclusion from any future planting, meaning the forestry work that accidentally revealed the site also, in effect, helped preserve it.