What it actually represents is a fulacht fiadh, the Irish term for a burnt mound, one of the most common yet least-understood monument types in the Irish archaeological record. These sites, typically dating to the Bronze Age, are the remains of outdoor cooking or processing areas where stones were heated in fire and then plunged into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. The stones fracture and blacken with repeated use, and over time they accumulate in a characteristic horseshoe-shaped or oval spread around the trough. The mound at Crushyriree measures roughly twelve metres east to west and eight metres north to south, a modest but legible deposit of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-enriched soil.

The key to understanding why this particular spot was chosen lies just off the mound itself, though that evidence is now largely gone. A spring well and a small stream, both recorded on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1935, once ran to the north of the spread. Water was essential to the whole operation, and burnt mounds are almost always found close to a reliable natural source of it. Local information indicates that both the well and the stream were drained during land improvement works in the 1960s, removing the very feature that would have made the site intelligible to a casual observer. A second possible burnt mound lies approximately 160 metres to the east-south-east, and the clustering of two such sites in close proximity is not unusual; suitable water sources in the landscape would have drawn repeated use across generations.