It is made of heat-shattered sandstone fragments packed into black, charcoal-rich soil, and that combination of cracked stone and scorched earth is the signature of a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking site found in their hundreds across Ireland. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the repeated cracking of the rock eventually producing the distinctive spreads and mounds that survive today.

This particular example measures roughly 13.8 metres from north to south and 12 metres from east to west, rising to about 0.8 metres at its northern end and 1.5 metres at its southern end. On the western side, a hollow in the mound appears to mark where the trough once sat, the point around which the whole operation would have turned. The site sits in the south-western corner of a field of rough, poorly-drained pasture on the western bank of a stream, and the proximity to running water is entirely typical. Fulachtaí fia are almost always found near streams, rivers, or boggy ground, because a reliable water supply was essential to the process. The damp, marginal ground that makes this corner of the field awkward for farming is likely the same reason the mound has survived largely intact.