The mounds are easy to miss, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes them interesting. Eleven sites along this stretch were identified by a researcher named Will Forbes, but none of them fits the textbook profile of what archaeologists are actually looking for.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland. In its classic form, it consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a timber-lined trough. The accepted interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, most likely for cooking, though theories about bathing, brewing, and textile processing have all been proposed. What makes the Curraghadobbin examples unusual is that none of them shows this characteristic shape or any clear evidence of a trough. The mounds here range considerably in size, from roughly 17 metres across to an outlier measuring over 51 metres by 32 metres, with heights between about 0.2 and 0.68 metres. They are described as low and amorphous, meaning they could be the heavily degraded remains of prehistoric activity, or they could simply be natural undulations in the landscape. The distinction, at this point, cannot be made with confidence.