These are the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of site found in large numbers across Ireland, typically dating from around 1500 BC onward. The basic principle was straightforward: a trough, usually timber-lined and filled with water, was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water reached cooking temperature. The broken, heat-shattered stones were then discarded to the side, building up over time into the horseshoe-shaped or irregular mounds that survive today. At Faha, that accumulated debris survives as a spread of burnt material that incorporates the remains of both mounds.

The two mounds appear on the 1939 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which is itself a useful marker of how long such features have been part of the recorded landscape even when their significance was only partially understood. By the time the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 3 was published in 1997, the site had been documented as a fulacht fia with the characteristic spread of scorched and fragmented stone still visible across the area. The proximity to a stream is entirely typical; reliable water was a practical necessity for the whole process, and the vast majority of fulachta fiadh in Ireland are found close to a watercourse or natural spring.