These are the low, horseshoe-shaped mounds that appear in their thousands across boggy ground throughout Ireland, most dating to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC. The prevailing interpretation is that they were cooking sites: a stone-lined trough filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled, then used to cook meat. The characteristic crescent mound forms from the repeated disposal of those shattered, heat-spent stones over generations of use. Some researchers have proposed alternative functions, from textile processing to communal bathing, and the debate has never been entirely settled.

Cordal lies in a quiet stretch of Kerry, inland from the better-known coastal scenery, in country that would have been equally inhabited during the Bronze Age as at any later period. The presence of a fulacht fia here fits a pattern seen across the Irish midlands and south-west, where these monuments cluster near streams and in low-lying, seasonally wet ground, precisely the conditions needed to keep a trough reliably filled. The fire-cracked stone that accumulates within and around the mound is often the most visible diagnostic feature, and it can survive for millennia in anaerobic boggy soil, which is part of why so many of these sites are still detectable today.