They appear as low, rounded mounds, often crescent-shaped, built up over generations from the cracked and fire-shattered stones that were their by-product. The one recorded at Cragballyconoal in County Clare is a quiet addition to that vast and curious company.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a cooking method that involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The process is simple but effective, and experiments have shown it works well. Most of these sites date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some were in use earlier or later. They tend to cluster near streams or boggy ground, where water was reliably close at hand, and Clare, with its varied limestone landscape and numerous small watercourses, has no shortage of them. Beyond its townland location at Cragballyconoal, the specific details of this particular mound, its dimensions, its condition, its precise setting within the landscape, are not currently available in the public record.

What can be said is that the townland name itself places it within a part of Clare whose placenames carry layers of older Irish, and that the monument, however modest it may appear on the ground, represents a repeated human activity, probably seasonal, carried out over many years by communities who left almost nothing else behind.