That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting. The site belongs to a category of prehistoric monument known as a fulacht fia, a term referring to burnt mound sites found in their thousands across Ireland. The typical arrangement involves a trough, often timber-lined or stone-lined, filled with water heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The discarded stones, blackened and shattered from repeated heating and cooling, accumulate into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives long after everything else has gone. They are usually found near water, which is why the spring to the south-east of this site fits the pattern so precisely.

The record for this particular mound is thin but telling. P. J. Hartnett noted it in 1939, describing it simply as a mound of blackened and charred stones, and it appeared that same year on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular feature. Both details are consistent with a fulacht fia, though the circular rather than horseshoe outline is worth noting as a minor curiosity. Since Hartnett's time, the area has become heavily overgrown, and more recent attempts to locate the site have not succeeded. It exists more confidently on paper than it does on the ground.

That condition, being mapped but lost, is not unusual for this class of monument. Fulachtaí fia are so numerous across the Irish landscape that many were recorded once and never revisited, gradually absorbed back into the vegetation or simply overlooked without the clear visual cues of a standing stone or earthwork. This one sits in marshy ground beside a spring, precisely where you would expect to find it, and precisely where you would struggle to reach it.