The mound itself has long since been levelled, flattened over centuries of agriculture, but where a field drain slices through the ground, a dense layer of heat-shattered stone sits exposed in section, ten metres long and roughly sixty centimetres deep. This is what archaeologists call a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a Bronze Age cooking method in which stones were repeatedly heated in fire and then plunged into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The stones crack and fracture with thermal shock and are eventually discarded, building up over time into the distinctive mounds of blackened, fire-crazed material that survive in their thousands across Ireland.

At Cloonakeemoge, the evidence survives in fragmentary but legible form. The drain, itself around one and a half metres wide and over a metre deep, has cut through the deposit and left it visible in profile. Along the north-eastern edge of the drain, a low bank of upcast soil still contains burnt mound material thrown up during the drain's construction, and a spread of the same material extends roughly six metres eastward across what is now level ground. The original mound surface has effectively been erased, but its contents remain in the soil. A second burnt mound lies approximately one hundred metres to the south-south-east, which is not unusual; these sites often cluster in low-lying, waterlogged ground where a reliable water source made the cooking technique practical.