Burnt mounds, known in Irish archaeology as fulachtaí fia, are among the most common Bronze Age monuments in Ireland, and they almost always appear near water. They consist of the accumulated debris from a cooking or heating process in which stones were placed in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the liquid to a boil. The cracked and shattered stones were raked aside after each use, building up into a characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped heap over time. This particular example is a modest one, roughly nine and a half metres long, just under two metres wide, and only about a quarter of a metre high.

The mound would likely have gone unrecorded had it not sat in the path of the N8 Mitchelstown relief road. When construction planning began, an excavation was carried out in 2004 to investigate what lay along the route. The dig revealed that the southern edge of the mound had already been disturbed by a diverted stream bed. Beneath the mound itself, excavators found two small pits, set about two and a half metres apart, which may represent the remains of earlier activity on the site. A further pit discovered roughly thirteen metres to the north-west proved more striking, containing three pottery vessels, suggesting that the area around the mound was in use for purposes beyond simple cooking or stone-boiling. The pottery points towards a more deliberate, possibly ritual or domestic, engagement with this stretch of riverbank, though the exact nature of that activity remains open to interpretation.