The example at Coolageela in north County Cork sits in rough grazing ground, about fifteen metres north of a well, and presents itself as an oval mound of burnt stone and earth measuring roughly fourteen metres by sixteen metres, with a central depression nearly four metres across and half a metre deep. A low platform surrounds the mound from the north-west around to the east-south-east, accompanied by a shallow fosse, the whole arrangement extending up to nine metres beyond the mound's edge. To the casual eye it reads as a slight rise in a field, easy to walk past without a second thought.

A fulacht fia, sometimes rendered fulacht fiadh, is essentially a prehistoric cooking place, typically Bronze Age in date. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a trough of water to bring it to the boil, perhaps for cooking meat, and the crescent or horseshoe shaped mound that survives today is the accumulated heap of those fire-shattered, heat-crazed stones, discarded after repeated use. The Coolageela site is notable for its company. A researcher named Bowman, writing in 1934, recorded as many as ten fulachta fiadh within the same townland, suggesting this corner of north Cork saw sustained and repeated activity over a long period rather than a single isolated episode. The proximity of the monument to a well fits a pattern seen across Ireland, where these sites cluster near reliable water sources, an obvious practical requirement for any process depending on large volumes of water.