The stretch of tarmac sealing it in is, almost certainly, older than anyone driving over it would suspect. What remains visible above ground is a modest exposure of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-darkened soil running about nine metres along the base of an earthen field boundary on the eastern side of a road, on a south-facing slope. The layer is only about thirty centimetres high. It is, by any measure, a fragment.

Burnt mounds are among the more enigmatic monument types found across Ireland and Britain. They are low, kidney-shaped or crescentic accumulations of fire-cracked stone and dark, charcoal-rich earth, typically Bronze Age in origin, and most likely the debris from repeated cycles of heating stones and plunging them into water-filled troughs, possibly for cooking, bathing, or other communal purposes. Nobody is entirely certain. What is known about the Kilcaskan example is that the visible remnant is only a portion of a once larger mound. Local information indicates the bulk of it was disturbed during road widening at some point in the past, and that most of the burnt material was simply spread across the road surface and subsequently sealed under tarmac when the road was surfaced. The archaeology, in other words, was not destroyed so much as relocated horizontally by a few metres and then buried under a more modern layer entirely.