The monument belongs to a class known as fulachta fia, a term used for ancient outdoor cooking sites typically characterised by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone beside a trough, which would have been filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. They are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain poorly understood, their precise social function, whether for cooking meat, bathing, brewing, or something else entirely, still debated by archaeologists.

In 1983, a researcher named O'Flaherty identified seven such sites in the Clohoge and Rathcash area during fieldwalking carried out ahead of the laying of the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline. By that point, all seven had been ploughed out and reduced to roughly circular scatters of burnt stone and charcoal at ground level, with no visible troughs remaining. Because of this absence, they were later reclassified from fulachta fia to the broader category of burnt mounds. Only the Clohoge site fell within the actual pipeline corridor, and so it alone was excavated, in work recorded by O'Flaherty in 1987. The dig uncovered burnt stone and charcoal spread across a two-metre-wide area, with soil discolouration and stone embedded in the underlying boulder clay indicating that the original mound had extended at least 1.5 metres on its southern side. No finds of any kind were recovered, and no trough appeared, though the excavators noted that one may simply have lain outside the narrow limits of the trench. The other six sites, their archaeology intact or further degraded, remain in the surrounding fields, largely unmarked and unexamined.