It measures roughly seven metres along its longer axis and rises only 0.65 metres from the surrounding ground, modest enough to be walked past without a second glance. What lies beneath the turf, however, is a mass of burnt material, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically comprising a trough, a hearth, and a mound of fire-cracked stone. The method is thought to have involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, allowing meat to be cooked. The shattered, heat-spent stones were then discarded nearby, accumulating over repeated use into the low, kidney-shaped or oval mounds that survive today. Most date to the Bronze Age, though the tradition may have persisted longer in some areas. The Cummeengeera example sits roughly seventy metres east of a stream, which would have supplied the necessary water, and is surrounded by blanket bog, the kind of wet, peat-forming landscape where fulachta fia are commonly found preserved, the bog acting as a slow and effective seal over centuries of accumulation.

The site is unenclosed and sits within ordinary farmland in the Cummeengeera valley in south-west Kerry, a remote and thinly settled part of the Beara Peninsula. Its surroundings, blanket bog and rough grazing, are much as they would have been for a very long time, which lends the mound a certain continuity with its prehistoric context, even if that context is now mostly invisible at ground level.