These features typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, the discarded residue of a process in which stones were heated and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They date mostly from the Bronze Age, though some continued in use much later, and their precise function, whether for cooking, bathing, brewing, or some combination, remains a matter of debate among archaeologists. What survives at Ballyhoura is not much to see from the surface, but the site carries a quiet interest precisely because of how completely ordinary life has swallowed it.

By the time a 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it, the fulacht fia appeared as a mound sitting close to farm buildings, already half-absorbed into a working agricultural landscape. At some point after that, the mound was buried under a concrete yard. Two further fulachtaí fia survive in the immediate vicinity, one roughly 100 metres to the north-west and another about 200 metres to the north, suggesting that this stretch of north Cork was a place of repeated or prolonged prehistoric activity rather than a single isolated episode. The clustering of such sites is not unusual in Ireland, where river valleys and low-lying ground with reliable water sources seem to have drawn people back generation after generation.