What it actually represents is one of thousands of prehistoric cooking sites scattered across the Irish landscape, known as fulachta fia. The term refers to a type of monument, typically Bronze Age in origin, consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up over centuries of use around a trough where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a nearby fire. The method is surprisingly efficient, and experimental archaeology has shown it can bring a trough to a boil within minutes.

What makes the Glenleigh example quietly interesting is the way the archaeology has been absorbed into the working fabric of the field. The burnt material, that distinctive blackened, crumbly spread that marks these sites, has been incorporated into a field fence, with the scatter extending roughly one to two metres onto the western side of the boundary. Someone, at some point in the post-medieval or modern period, simply built through it, pressing prehistoric debris into service as convenient fill. The monument sits in rough grazing, which has helped preserve what remains under a mat of grass rather than exposing it to more intensive disturbance. The description derives from the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 3, covering Mid Cork, published in 1997.