To the untrained eye it reads as a modest grassy hump in wet ground. It is, in fact, a fulacht fia, one of the most numerous and least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape. These burnt mound sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are thought to date primarily from the Bronze Age and are generally interpreted as outdoor cooking places, though theories about their use range from food preparation to bathing or brewing. The defining feature is a trough into which water was channelled and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it repeatedly; the discarded stones, blackened and shattered, accumulate over time into the characteristic mound shape.

The Cummeenavrick example sits on the south side of the old Killarney to Ballyvourney road, a route with considerable antiquity in its own right as a mountain crossing between Kerry and Cork. The mound measures fifteen metres north to south and seven metres east to west, rising to a maximum height of one metre. On its western face, a one-metre-wide entrance opens into a trough roughly two and a half metres across and sunk about forty centimetres below the crest of the mound. The trough faces directly toward the nearby stream, just five metres distant, which would have supplied the water essential to the site's function. The relationship between the trough and the watercourse is characteristic of the type; proximity to a reliable water source appears to have been a primary consideration when these sites were established.

The site sits within open mountain ground, and the marshy, level field around it is part of what has preserved it. Waterlogged conditions tend to discourage later cultivation and disturbance, which is one reason so many fulachtaí fia survive in low-lying or boggy terrain. The dominant aspect here is to the south-east and west, giving a sense of the broader upland landscape in which this quietly functional Bronze Age site once operated.