It is made almost entirely of burnt material, the scorched and fire-cracked stones that are the signature of a fulacht fia, and its curved, open-ended shape is typical of the type. These are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain genuinely puzzling. The general consensus holds that they were used for cooking, probably by boiling water in a trough using heated stones, though some researchers have proposed other uses including textile processing or brewing. The mound itself is the accumulated debris of that process, the discarded stones cracked by repeated heating and cooling, piled up over time into the characteristic horseshoe form around the trough.

What makes Coolowen particularly notable is not the single mound but the pair. A second fulacht fia lies roughly twenty metres to the south, suggesting that whatever activity took place here was substantial enough, or repeated over a long enough period, to leave two distinct monuments side by side. The marshy ground they occupy is no accident; a reliable water source was essential to the process, and low-lying, seasonally wet land was consistently favoured. The site was recorded by Walsh in 1985 and included in the published Archaeological Inventory of County Cork covering the east and south of the county.