What remained was enough to recognise it as a fulacht fia, the term used for a type of ancient cooking or heating site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of discarded burnt stone accumulated beside a water trough. They are mundane in one sense, the prehistoric equivalent of a field kitchen, yet their sheer frequency across the Irish countryside, and the questions that still surround their exact purpose, give each one a certain quiet weight.

When Cleary excavated the northern portion of the mound over two months in the spring and early summer of 1984, the investigation uncovered a stone-lined trough of trapezoidal shape, measuring roughly two metres by one and a quarter metres, along with a hearth enclosed within a stone-built revetment, a facing of stone used to retain and stabilise an earthen structure. The hearth itself was slightly larger, extending to around two metres at its longest dimension. A charcoal sample taken from the hearth was radiocarbon dated to the Later Bronze Age, returning a measurement of 3090 plus or minus 35 BP, which places activity here somewhere in the broad range of the second to early first millennium BC. There was also a possible revetment to the north of the mound, suggesting the original structure may have been more substantial before reclamation disturbed it. The site is a reminder that Bronze Age communities in this part of Cork were making calculated, repeated use of specific locations, heating water by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, and leaving behind the accumulated debris of those episodes in the characteristic mounded form that survives, when it does, as a low spread of dark, shattered stone.