It measures roughly 38.5 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south, rising only about 0.7 metres from the surrounding ground, with possible openings on its southern and north-western sides. What it represents, however, is one of the most distinctive and widespread features of prehistoric Ireland.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the accumulated debris of an ancient cooking or heating site, typically a trough dug near a water source into which stones were heated in fire and then dropped to boil the water. The stones shatter with repeated heating and cooling, and over time the broken, burnt fragments pile up into the horseshoe or rectangular mounds that survive today. The Ballyhoolahan example is not an isolated curiosity; it was probably one of nineteen such sites recorded within the same townland by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, making this particular stretch of north Cork an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric activity. Fulachta fiadh are found in their thousands across Ireland, dating broadly to the Bronze Age, though the precise purposes they served, cooking, bathing, textile processing, or some combination, continues to be debated by archaeologists.