The find sits roughly sixty metres north of a small stream running northwest to southeast, which is precisely where you would expect it to be: water was the whole point.

The spread was identified during the construction of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline, recorded by Sleeman in 1983, and interpreted as probable remains of a fulacht fiadh. A fulacht fiadh, in its simplest form, is a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug near a water source, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of those same stones once they had been cracked by repeated heating and cooling. Water in the trough was brought to a boil by dropping the fire-heated stones into it, and meat, wrapped in straw or placed directly in the water, was cooked without any vessel that could withstand flame. The characteristic burnt and shattered stone spreads left behind are among the most common archaeological features found across the Irish landscape, with the majority dating to the Bronze Age, though some sites were used into the early medieval period. What survives at Ballybur is modest, a spread rather than an intact mound, but the pairing of charcoal with burnt clay is a recognisable signature of the process, and the proximity to running water follows the pattern closely.