The site measures roughly 32 metres along its longer axis and 20 metres across, and beneath the turf it consists of heat-shattered stones and soil darkened with charcoal, the signature material of a burnt mound. The precise outline cannot be made out from the surface, but fragments of the same burnt material have turned up in a V-shaped field drain cut along the northern boundary, suggesting the spread continues beyond what is immediately visible.

Burnt mounds are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain genuinely puzzling. They are associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, and typically form beside a source of water. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then plunged into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a process repeated until the stones cracked and became useless, at which point they were discarded into the growing mound nearby. What exactly this boiling water was used for, whether cooking, bathing, textile processing, or something else entirely, is still debated. The location at Killeendaniel fits the pattern closely: a slope, waterlogged ground close at hand, and, about 250 metres to the south-west, what appears to be a second burnt mound of the same type, suggesting this small area of Cork was a place of repeated or sustained activity over a considerable period.