This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically beside a water source. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the process repeated until whatever was being cooked, whether meat or something else entirely, was done. The proximity of a stream, just to the west of a later field wall, fits the pattern precisely.

The mound at Glencolumbkille measures thirteen metres east to west and eight metres north to south, and reaches its greatest height of between 1.4 and 1.6 metres at its western end, where rubble, tree roots, and branches have also been dumped at some point, obscuring whatever detail might remain there. The eastern portions of the mound are considerably lower, between 0.4 and 0.8 metres. It was listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. A second fulacht fia was reported in the immediate vicinity, but when the site was inspected in 1999, nothing of it was visible at ground level, leaving its existence unconfirmed. About thirty metres to the east stand the remains of a tower house, a type of fortified medieval residence common across Ireland from roughly the fourteenth century onward, which gives the spot an unexpected layering of periods: prehistoric cooking site and medieval stronghold sharing the same small patch of Clare landscape, separated by millennia but now neighbours in the same overgrown corner.