That uncertainty is not a failure of record-keeping so much as a reflection of what burnt mounds are: low, unspectacular accumulations of fire-cracked stone and darkened earth, the byproduct of a Bronze Age cooking or bathing technique in which water was heated by dropping stones from a fire into a trough. They rarely announce themselves, and they can vanish entirely beneath a season's growth of grass.

A survey in 1995 noted a possible example here, measuring roughly 5.2 metres north to south and 4.4 metres east to west, composed of stony earth. Surveyors remarked that the soil was not as dark as that of a second possible burnt mound recorded roughly 250 metres to the north-east, a detail that itself signals some hesitation about the identification. When fieldworkers returned in 2002, they could not locate it. They tried again in 2008, with the field still under pasture, and again found nothing. The mound had not been disturbed or removed in any documented way; it had simply become invisible, or perhaps had never been quite substantial enough to hold its shape against the ordinary processes of grazing land.

What remains is a coordinate, a tentative measurement, and a small question about what lies beneath an unremarkable Cork hillside. The nearby mound to the north-east survives in the record as a separate entry, which gives the Killeendaniel site a peculiar quality: it exists largely by comparison, defined in part by what it is not quite as clear-cut as.