These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are among the most common and least understood monuments in the Irish landscape. The prevailing theory is that they represent prehistoric cooking places, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil, shattering in the process. The broken, fire-cracked stone and blackened earth were discarded nearby, accumulating over repeated use into the low mounds that survive today.

At Teeveeny, the evidence is slight but telling. A black lens, roughly thirty centimetres long and thirty centimetres deep, is visible in the western face of the drain at about sixty centimetres below ground level, though it does not appear in the eastern face, suggesting the deposit is localised rather than continuous. The heat-shattered stone and charcoal-rich material seem to have been disturbed and partially displaced during the drain's cutting, leaving the archaeology in an ill-defined scatter rather than its original form. A marshy area thick with reeds and rushes lies immediately to the north, which fits the pattern well. Burnt mounds are almost always found near wet ground or a reliable water source, which would have been essential to whatever process was taking place.