It is, in all likelihood, a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape. The term refers to a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of discarded, heat-shattered stone is what usually survives, and here that mound endures beneath a skin of pasture grass, its original surface stones long since removed.

The site appears to be the same one noted by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, who recorded a fulacht fiadh on land then belonging to a Mrs Pigott. There is a small geographical puzzle attached to it: Bowman placed the monument in the townland of Minehill, the one immediately adjacent to Garrane, which suggests either a boundary ambiguity or a slight error in one of the two records. The removal of surface stones, presumably at some point before Bowman's visit or shortly after, was a common fate for such sites, since farmers found the broken, heat-reddened stone useful as hardcore or fill. What remains is the subsurface spread of that burnt material, anonymous in a pasture and easy to miss.