These low, horseshoe-shaped mounds, typically dark with charred and shattered stone, are the remains of ancient burnt mound sites. The working theory is that they served as outdoor cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, though other uses, from brewing to textile processing to bathing, have also been proposed. The example at An Gabhlán Beag in County Kerry is one such site, quiet in the landscape and easy to overlook without some prior knowledge of what the form actually represents.

An Gabhlán Beag sits within a county that has yielded a significant concentration of these monuments, and this particular site was recorded as number 38 in a dedicated thesis on Kerry fulachtaí fia compiled by Clare McMorran for University College Galway. Such academic cataloguing work has been essential to building a coherent picture of how these sites are distributed across the region, since individual mounds rarely announce themselves dramatically. The burnt and fragmented stone that gives a fulacht fia its characteristic dark colouring is the residue of repeated heating and rapid cooling, a process that causes stone to crack and eventually become useless for further heating, at which point it was discarded to form the mound itself.