It measures roughly ten metres long, seven metres wide, and barely twenty centimetres high, which is modest even by the standards of what it represents: a fulacht fia, the remains of a Bronze Age cooking or processing site. These features, found in their thousands across Ireland, were typically built around a trough dug into the ground, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The burnt and shattered stone was then piled to the side over time, and it is precisely that accumulated debris, blackened and heat-fractured, that forms the mound still visible today.

The site was recorded as early as 1934, when a researcher named Bowman noted two fulachta fiadh in this part of north Cork on land then belonging to a Mrs Morley. The Coalpits mound is believed to be one of those two. Beyond that passing reference, the documentary record is thin, which is itself fairly typical: fulachta fiadh were for a long time dismissed as marginal curiosities before archaeologists came to appreciate just how widespread and significant they are as a class of monument. Their exact function is still debated; cooking remains the dominant theory, but some researchers have proposed hide-working, textile processing, or bathing. The Coalpits example offers no particular resolution to that debate, but its survival in pasture, beside the same watercourse that would have supplied its trough, gives it a quiet coherence with the landscape it came from.