Local tradition names it a fulacht fiadh, the type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically identified by the scorched, fire-cracked stones that accumulate beside a water trough after repeated heating and quenching. The puzzle here is that when the site was inspected in 1998, no burnt stone was visible at all, leaving its true nature genuinely unresolved.

A fulacht fiadh, in the conventional understanding, is a Bronze Age cooking place where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. The characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of discarded burnt and shattered stone is usually what betrays such a site in the landscape. This site in Ballydonohoe bears the right general shape, a roughly subcircular area measuring approximately 16.5 metres north to south and 14.5 metres east to west, with a broad, low surrounding bank of earth and stone and a sunken interior around half a metre below the level of the ground outside. But the absence of the defining burnt material means it could equally be something else entirely, perhaps an enclosure of a different period and purpose altogether. It was absent from both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996, meaning it had slipped through the formal cataloguing processes for decades before receiving any documented attention. The site sits within what appears to be an extensive, multi-period field system, suggesting that people worked and managed this ground across many different eras.