These are the remains of prehistoric cooking sites, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after repeated use of a water-filled trough heated with hot stones. They are Bronze Age features, found in their thousands across Ireland, usually in low-lying or waterlogged ground, and the one at Barrahaurin fits the type: quietly present in agricultural land, its full extent never properly measured.

What makes this particular site worth noting is not what survives but what was lost. According to local information, a mound of roughly one metre in height was levelled in 1992, reducing what had been a visible earthwork to a diffuse, grass-covered scatter. The reclamation of the surrounding pasture had presumably already placed pressure on the site for some time before that, and the combination of agricultural improvement and the final levelling means that whatever the mound preserved of its original structure and stratigraphy is now gone. What remains is the burnt spread itself, its boundaries still undetermined.