It was roughly a metre high and eight metres across, with a slight hollow at its centre, and for most of its existence it was simply part of the farmyard landscape, sitting directly behind a local house. Then, in the mid-1980s, land reclamation work arrived, small fields were amalgamated, and the mound was bulldozed away. What the machinery revealed as it worked through the feature was a mass of small broken stones and dark, charred soil, along with fragments of timber resembling bog deal, the resinous, preserved pine found in Irish peatlands. The mound was a fulacht fiadh, a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric cooking or heating site found across Ireland in considerable numbers, typically associated with Bronze Age communities. They are usually identified by exactly this combination: heat-shattered stones discarded after repeated use, scorched organic material, and a characteristic crescent or circular profile caused by the gradual accumulation of waste around a central trough or hearth.

The site at Knockanush sat in a landscape already marked by earlier human activity. Directly above it on the hillside was a substantial fort, catalogued in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland as KE029-056, and the pairing of such features, a large enclosure on higher ground and a domestic or functional site at its base, is not unusual in Kerry's prehistoric record. Michael Connolly drew attention to this site in his 2008 doctoral thesis for University College Cork, which examined prehistoric settlement across the Lee Valley and surrounding area around Tralee. His work placed individual, easily overlooked features like this mound into a wider pattern of how people organised themselves across the landscape. The landowner's memory of the mound, recounted as part of that research, is now among the few remaining records of a structure that no longer exists in any physical form.