The uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting. The feature was recorded as a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric burnt mound typically associated with outdoor cooking, in which water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough, leaving behind a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of shattered, heat-blackened rock. These sites are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, yet this particular example sits in an odd position: recognised in person, but absent from both historic maps and more recent aerial photography.

The site came to light in 2000, when Michael Connolly, County Archaeologist with Kerry County Council, was carrying out a systematic assessment of a forty square mile area to inform the routing of a new road north of Killarney. That kind of survey work, covering large tracts of ordinary farmland rather than known monument clusters, occasionally turns up features that have never been formally recorded. Connolly reported this one to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland as an extant fulacht fia, meaning it appeared to him to be a genuine, surviving example at the time of his visit. The complication is that neither older Ordnance Survey mapping nor aerial imagery captured in 2010 and 2015 shows any trace of it, which leaves the feature in an unresolved state: observed on the ground by a trained eye, but unconfirmed by any other means.