It does not look like much at first glance, but beneath the overgrown surface lies a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape. These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are essentially the remnants of ancient cooking places, where stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough, and used to bring the water to a boil. Over repeated use, the cracked and spent stones were raked out and piled to one side, building up over time into the characteristic mounds that survive today.

The Dromanarrigle example follows the form well. There is a roughly circular mound of burnt and fire-cracked material, around twelve metres across and just under a metre high, sitting on the southern side of what is now a dried-up stream bed. Extending from its southern edge is a horseshoe-shaped mound, that distinctive curved form that so often marks where the trough itself once sat, measuring nearly twelve metres east to west and just under nine metres north to south, with an opening about four metres wide facing south. The horseshoe shape is the signature of the type; the opening would have faced the working area, and the curved arms of burnt stone built up on either side and behind the trough as the discarded material accumulated. Bronze Age in date for the most part, though some sites have proved earlier or later, fulachta fiadh are rarely dramatic, but they represent something immediate and domestic, evidence of repeated, purposeful activity carried out beside a reliable water source that has since dried up entirely.