The burnt mound at Tylagh is what archaeologists call a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in great numbers across Ireland. The typical arrangement involves a stone-lined trough filled with water, into which fire-heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. Over time, those stones cracked and shattered, and the resulting spreads of heat-fractured rock were piled up around the trough, forming the distinctive curved mound that survives today.

The Tylagh example is notably well-preserved. Measuring roughly 8 metres north to south and 8.6 metres east to west, with a maximum height of 0.80 metres, it has escaped the field clearance that has damaged or destroyed so many comparable sites elsewhere. The trough area, measuring 2 metres by 1.5 metres, is still visible to the north-west of the mound, and a stream runs close by on the same side, just 15 metres away, which would have provided the water supply essential to the site's function. Sitting around 100 metres to the west of a nearby earthwork, possibly a ring-barrow, the mound forms part of a wider prehistoric landscape in the Lee Valley near Tralee. Its condition and proportions are described by Michael Connolly, in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of that valley, as an impressive example of the type.