By the time anyone looked carefully at the ground in June 1992, it had vanished entirely from the surface, absorbed back into the pasture. What had been recorded only a few years earlier was a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is generally understood to be a prehistoric cooking or processing site. The typical arrangement involves a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined and filled with water, into which heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. The spent, shattered stones were then raked aside, forming the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound around the trough. The site at Cloran was recorded by Cody in 1989 as a grassed-over example measuring 13.5 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 10 metres across, with the open end of the horseshoe facing southeast. It stood around 0.8 metres high at that point. A modern stone field wall had already cut across the western half of it, and when the site was inspected again in 1992, no visible surface trace remained. A separate mound survives roughly 65 metres to the northeast, suggesting this low-lying ground beside the stream was used, and reused, over a considerable period.