Beneath the surface, though, lies a scatter of burnt and heat-shattered stone roughly 24 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south, the footprint of a fulacht fia. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are among the most common prehistoric monuments in the country, though their purpose remains a matter of genuine debate. The most widely accepted explanation is that they functioned as cooking sites: a trough, typically timber-lined or stone-built, was filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The stones, once split and spent, were discarded in a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough, and it is these accumulations of blackened, fire-damaged stone that survive as the characteristic dark spreads still visible across Irish farmland.

The Cloghboola example once sat close to a well, now drained, roughly twenty metres to the north, a proximity that would have made practical sense for any activity requiring a reliable water source. At some point around 1978, according to local information, the mound was levelled, most likely as part of agricultural improvement work, a fate that came to a great many similar sites during the latter decades of the twentieth century, when land reclamation and drainage schemes reshaped large areas of Irish pasture. Levelling removes the visible profile of the mound but leaves the spread of burnt material in the soil, which is why the site remains traceable even now.