They appear as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds, typically dark in colour from the charred and fire-cracked stone that makes up their bulk. The one recorded at Cloghscregg in County Kilkenny is a representative example of this extraordinarily widespread but little-discussed class of monument.

A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially the remains of an ancient cooking site. The standard interpretation holds that a trough, often timber-lined, was filled with water, and stones heated in a nearby fire were then dropped in to bring the water to a boil. Repeated heating and rapid cooling caused the stones to fracture, and the discarded fragments accumulated into the characteristic mound over time. Most examples in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, broadly speaking the period from around 2000 to 500 BC, though some are earlier or later. What generated this particular mound at Cloghscregg, and who used it, remains unrecorded in any detail that has yet been made publicly available.