It measures roughly two metres long, two metres across, and rises to about a metre in height, which is to say it could easily be mistaken for a natural irregularity in the ground. But the burnt material visible just beneath the grass cover tells a different story, one that stretches back several thousand years.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age, though some examples are earlier or later. The name, from Old Irish, is loosely translated as "cooking place of the deer" or "cooking pit of the wild", and the working theory, supported by experiment, is that these sites were used for boiling water by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough. The characteristic crescent or horseshoe shape of the surrounding mound comes from the gradual accumulation of those shattered, fire-cracked stones, which become useless after a few heatings and are simply discarded to the side. Whether the sites were used for cooking meat, for bathing, for textile processing, or for some combination of purposes remains a matter of discussion among archaeologists. The Bloomfield example was recorded in a 1994 archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, covering the area around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, compiled by D. Lavelle.