The term refers to a mound of heat-shattered stone, typically horseshoe-shaped, that accumulated over repeated use of a water trough into which fire-heated stones were dropped to boil water. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, yet this particular example has left no mark on the surface whatsoever. Nothing signals its presence to anyone walking the land today.

The site was recorded as a mound on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1935, which means it was at least partially visible to surveyors working in that decade. At some point after that, whatever remained above ground was lost, likely through agricultural activity. What makes the Ballymacphilip location especially notable in a quiet, accidental way is the density of similar sites in its immediate vicinity. A second fulacht fia lies approximately sixty metres to the south, and a cluster of three more sits roughly sixty metres to the south-east. Five of these monuments within such a compact area suggests repeated, possibly sustained prehistoric activity in this part of the Cork landscape, though whether they were used simultaneously or represent returns to the same general location across generations is unknown.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and the site sits in private farmland, so a visit in any conventional sense is not really possible. The interest here is almost entirely in the idea of the place: a cluster of Bronze Age cooking sites that survived long enough to be mapped in the twentieth century, and then quietly disappeared into the soil.