A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a nearby fire. The burnt mound at Coolalta is modest, measuring roughly six metres north to south and two metres east to west, and survives as little more than a discolouration in the soil, the kind of thing a plough can reduce to near-nothing within a generation.

What makes the Coolalta site quietly interesting is not its size but its company. A second fulacht fia lies approximately thirty metres to the east, and a spread of dark-coloured soil, possibly indicating further activity of some kind, sits around ninety metres to the north-east. Clusters like this are not unusual; fulachtaí fia are often found in loose groupings, which has led archaeologists to debate whether they represent repeated seasonal use of a favoured spot, the work of different groups over centuries, or activity that was broadly communal in nature. Bronze Age in date for the most part, though some examples have produced earlier and later results, these sites tend to gravitate toward low-lying, wet ground where water was reliably close. The Coolalta examples, caught now under tillage, would once have sat in a landscape shaped more by that practical logic than by any we would easily read today.