This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically interpreted as a Bronze Age cooking place where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The stones, shattered by the cycle of heating and quenching, were piled to one side after each use, and it is that accumulated mound of dark, crumbly burnt material that survives into the present. At Dromtarriff, the mound measures roughly sixteen metres north to south and fourteen metres east to west, a respectable size that hints at sustained, repeated use over what may have been a very long period.

When Bowman recorded the site in 1934, he noted that the surface stones had already been removed, meaning the mound had been disturbed before it ever received formal archaeological attention. That kind of interference was common; farmers clearing fields often shifted loose stone without any awareness of what the scatter represented. The underlying deposit of burnt and heat-shattered material remained in place, however, and the mound was substantial enough to survive as a recognisable feature into the twenty-first century. Bowman's record, published in 1934, represents one of the earlier attempts to document these sites systematically in County Cork, at a time when fulachtaí fia were not yet fully understood as a distinct site type with a coherent function.