To the untrained eye it is just a low, dark mound; to an archaeologist it is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. The term refers to a prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground beside a water source, a hearth for heating stones, and the gradually built-up mound of fire-cracked rock that was discarded after each use. Experiments have shown the method works efficiently: stones heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough can bring it to a boil within minutes and keep it there long enough to cook meat. What draws people to these sites is partly the sheer ordinariness of the technology and partly the fact that nobody is entirely sure that cooking was always, or even mainly, their purpose.

The site at Doonasleen sits in pasture, its burnt spread now softened under a covering of grass. What makes the location particularly interesting is that a second fulacht fia lies roughly forty metres to the south-west. The proximity of two such sites to one another is not unique in Ireland, where fulachta fia are sometimes found in loose clusters, but it does raise quiet questions about repeated use of a landscape, about whether the same community returned to the same general spot across generations, or whether two separate periods of activity happened to settle near the same water source. No excavation details are recorded here, so the relationship between the two mounds remains open.