It measures roughly twenty metres from north to south and eighteen from east to west, rising only about forty centimetres from the surrounding ground, with a slight hollow pressed into its southern face. What it actually represents is one of the more intriguing recurring features of the Irish Bronze Age landscape: a fulacht fia, essentially the scorched debris left behind by an ancient cooking site where stones were repeatedly heated in fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Over time, as the cracked and spent stones were raked aside, they accumulated into exactly this kind of horseshoe or oval mound of dark, charred material.

The site is one of two fulachta fiadh in close proximity here, and both were recorded by a researcher named Bowman as early as 1934, who noted them as lying roughly fifty yards south of a nearby ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind widely built across Ireland from the Iron Age through the early medieval period. That ringfort still stands approximately forty metres to the north. The pairing of a fulacht fia with a ringfort is not unusual; both monument types are extraordinarily common across the Cork countryside, and their proximity here may reflect centuries of overlapping activity in a spot that offered reliable water from the springs just to the south. Water was essential to the fulacht fia process, and such monuments are almost invariably found close to streams, bogs, or, as in this case, natural spring sources.