It measures roughly twelve metres across and rises no more than sixty centimetres at its highest point, which is to say it is easy to miss and easier still to dismiss. What it actually represents is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically near water or in wet ground. The characteristic form is a horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, the debris left behind after repeated cycles of heating rocks in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Here the mound is composed of shattered sandstone fragments bound together in a matrix of black soil, the dark colour itself a product of centuries of charcoal and organic material working into the earth.

The site does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it escaped the attention of nineteenth-century surveyors and has left no cartographic trace. The trough, the wooden or stone-lined pit that would have held the water, was probably located on the southern side of the mound, though the evidence for this is inferential rather than excavated. Fulachta fiadh are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though some have produced dates ranging from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period. Without excavation it is impossible to say more about when the people at Ballyeeskeen were making use of this spot, or for how long.