A fulacht fia, to give it its Irish name, was a type of outdoor cooking place used widely across prehistoric Ireland, typically involving a trough of water heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. This one, at the foot of the south-facing slopes of Knocknaveen, or Glan Hill as locals know it, was only noticed at Easter 1992, after drain-cutting the previous year exposed a dense layer of heat-fractured stone in the face of a drainage trench, sitting directly beneath a now-defunct field gate. A second fulacht fia lies roughly 47 metres to the south-south-east, further down the same slope.

An archaeological excavation carried out in September and October of 1992 cut an east-west section through the mound, which measured 8.2 metres across and stood 0.6 metres high where it was exposed. The north-south extent could not be fully established because part of the mound runs beneath the modern road. What the excavation did reveal was a sequence of layers with varying densities of stone and charcoal, a lack of uniformity that pointed to several distinct phases of use, including at least three separate firings of stones. Radiocarbon dating placed activity at the site between 1260 and 1010 BC, in the later Bronze Age. There is no visible stream nearby today, but the position at the foot of the hill would have generated surface run-off after rain, providing the water supply the site required. The road itself was built before 1816, and its construction significantly reworked the local topography. Among the finds recovered from spoil dug from a re-cut drain about five metres east of the mound was a pestle stone of green sandstone, now held by the National Museum of Ireland.