It measures roughly twelve metres by eleven metres and rises only about half a metre from the surrounding ground, giving it the appearance of a gentle hummock rather than anything obviously ancient. That unassuming profile is, in fact, entirely characteristic of what it is: a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, and one of the most quietly mysterious.

A fulacht fia is essentially the debris left behind by a Bronze Age cooking or processing site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and repeating the process until whatever was being cooked or treated was done. The stones, repeatedly heated and quenched, eventually shatter and become useless, and over time they accumulate into the horseshoe-shaped or irregular mounds that archaeologists now recognise across the Irish landscape. The burnt, fragmented stone gives these mounds their distinctive dark colouring, and the proximity to a water source, here the stream to the south-west of the mound, is almost universal among examples of this type. What exactly fulachta fiadh were used for remains a matter of debate; cooking meat is the traditional explanation, but proposals have ranged from textile dyeing to bathing to brewing.