They appear as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds, typically found near water, and are thought to date primarily from the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC. The mounds themselves are the accumulated debris of repeated cooking or heating activity, built up from cracked and fire-shattered stone that could no longer hold heat effectively and was discarded after use. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled. Whether this was for cooking meat, brewing, bathing, or some combination of purposes is still debated among archaeologists.

The example recorded near Clogheen in County Cork sits within a part of Munster where such monuments are relatively well represented, the landscape having preserved traces of Bronze Age activity across river valleys and boggy lowlands where the necessary water sources would have been readily available. Clogheen itself is a small south Tipperary border town close to the Knockmealdown Mountains, and the surrounding area straddles fertile lowland and upland terrain of the kind that Bronze Age communities moved through and worked in across the seasons. Without more detailed documentation currently available for this specific site, its precise dimensions, condition, and immediate setting remain unrecorded here, but its existence points to the long pattern of human activity in this corner of Munster that predates any written record by well over a millennium.