The spread of burnt material measures roughly 19 metres east to west and 13 metres north to south, rising to just 0.4 metres at its highest point, and modern drainage channels have cut across both its south-eastern and north-western ends.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in considerable numbers across Ireland and particularly common in Cork. The term, sometimes rendered as fulacht fiadh, is an old Irish phrase loosely associated with cooking places of the Fianna, the legendary hunter-warriors of early Irish tradition, though the name is largely a later romantic gloss on something far more practical. These sites are generally understood to date to the Bronze Age, and they functioned as outdoor cooking or processing sites. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire until they were intensely hot, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water rapidly to the boil. Over time, the used stones, cracked and shattered by repeated thermal shock, accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today. The marshy or waterlogged settings so often associated with these monuments were not incidental; easy access to water was central to how they worked.