These mounds are known as fulachta fia, a term referring to a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, with thousands recorded nationwide. The typical arrangement involves a trough dug into the ground, a nearby water source, and a heap of stones that were heated in a fire and then dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point. Food, likely wrapped in straw or hides, would then be cooked in the heated water. The shattered, heat-stressed stones, useless for further heating, were discarded to the side, and over centuries these discarded heaps became the horseshoe-shaped or kidney-shaped mounds that survive today.

Fulachta fia date most commonly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some have been found with earlier or later activity. The name Caheraphuca is itself worth a moment's attention: "cahir" derives from the Irish cathair, meaning a stone fort or circular stone enclosure, while "phuca" refers to the púca, a shapeshifting supernatural creature from Irish folklore often associated with liminal or uncanny places. A townland name combining a stone fort with a fairy trickster suggests a landscape that has accumulated layers of human attention and imagination over a very long period. The fulacht fia fits neatly into that kind of place, a site that was already ancient when medieval people were naming the land around it.