The mounds are subtle enough that a casual walker might take them for natural undulations in the landscape, and that uncertainty is precisely what makes this site interesting. Eleven features along this one stretch of river were identified by a researcher named Will Forbes, a concentration that is striking even if the individual mounds resist easy classification.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a sunken trough. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point, then using that heat to cook meat. The cracked and spent stones were raked aside after each use, gradually building up the characteristic mound. The mounds at Curraghadobbin range considerably in size, from around 17 metres in diameter up to an unusually large 51.6 metres by 32.2 metres, though their heights are modest, between 0.2 and 0.68 metres. None of them show the defining features of a classic fulacht fia: there is no clear trough, and the profiles are described as amorphous rather than the familiar horseshoe form. They may be heavily flattened examples of the type, their original shape eroded by centuries of agriculture and drainage work, or they may simply be natural rises in the low-lying ground. The river itself has been canalised and the surrounding fields reclaimed, which means the landscape these features once occupied has been significantly altered, making any reading of the site more difficult.