These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally interpreted as Bronze Age cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. Over time, the cracked and shattered stones were raked aside, building up the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that is the most visible sign of such a site today. At Broghill, that mound was still present within living memory, standing around 0.3 metres high, before it was levelled around 1981.

What remains now is the spread itself, a grass-covered trace of the activity that once took place here. The levelling of the mound, which local information confirms happened in the early 1980s, is a reminder of how routinely these low, unassuming earthworks have been absorbed back into agricultural land. The burnt and fragmented stone beneath the turf is essentially all that survives to mark what was, in its time, a functional and probably well-used feature of the Bronze Age landscape in this part of Cork.