It is a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, and yet one of the least visited. A fulacht fia is essentially an ancient cooking site, typically a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone built up beside a water source over many episodes of use. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, which would eventually crack and fragment the stones, building the mound over time. They date mostly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, and they appear in their thousands across the Irish landscape, often beside streams or in marshy ground.

This particular example turns up on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1940, recorded simply as a mound, which gives a sense of how long it has sat in the landscape as an unremarked feature, noted but not explained. By that point the wider category of fulacht fia was still only beginning to be understood by archaeologists. The site at Ballygroman fits the classic pattern in at least one respect: its position on the eastern bank of a stream, close to a reliable water source, is precisely where these monuments are most often found.

The site is currently inaccessible, lying within a coniferous plantation where dense planting makes approach difficult. This is not unusual for monuments of this kind, which were often absorbed into forestry during the twentieth century and have remained obscured since. The mound itself is presumably still there beneath the trees, doing what ancient mounds do best, which is wait.