It looks, to the untrained eye, like nothing more than a slight rise in the ground. In fact it is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of the cracked, burnt material left behind once the stones had shattered from repeated heating and quenching. The mound is what survives here, the accumulated debris of repeated use, most likely dating to the Bronze Age.

What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is not the mound itself but the company it keeps. Four other fulachta fiadha sit in the same field, the five sites arranged in a loose line running north-east for approximately 160 metres. Whether they represent a single community returning to the same stretch of ground over generations, or some more intensive concentration of activity at a specific point in the landscape, is difficult to say without excavation. But their clustering along what would have been a reliable water source, the nearby stream, is consistent with what is understood about how these sites functioned. Water was essential, used to fill the trough into which heated stones were dropped to raise the temperature rapidly. The burnt and shattered stones were then discarded to the side, building up over time into the low mounds still visible today.

The five sites together form one of the denser local groupings of this monument type in east Cork, and their survival in undisturbed pasture means the mounds retain something of their original profile. The stream beside which they sit has, in all likelihood, been flowing past this slope for as long as the monuments have stood.