Within the space of a single year, what had been a large, horseshoe-shaped mound was reduced to almost nothing, levelled by agricultural activity and left as little more than a scatter of broken stone and darkened soil around a small pond.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones beside a trough or pit. The stones would be heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, raising the temperature enough to cook meat or process other materials. The characteristic mounds form from the gradual accumulation of discarded, heat-shattered stones, which crack and splinter after repeated heating and cooling. At Ballyhoura, a large example was noted in 2007 by Mary Sleeman, but when the site was visited the following year, the mound had been levelled. What remained was a pond measuring roughly four metres north to south and eight metres east to west, surrounded by a spread of heat-shattered stones and charcoal-enriched soil extending approximately twenty metres in each direction. The clearest evidence of the site's former character was concentrated to the north-west of the pond, where the grass grew noticeably thinner over the disturbed ground beneath.

The sparser grass to the north-west offers the most visible clue that something lies beneath the surface, though the site itself now reads more as a landscape anomaly than an archaeological monument. The coniferous plantation on higher ground to the north-north-east serves as a rough navigational marker for anyone crossing the pasture.