The undulation is all that remains of a fulacht fia, the term used for the horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and fire-cracked stone that appear in their thousands across the Irish countryside. The basic idea behind them is elegantly simple: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and used to cook meat. The byproduct was a heap of shattered, heat-blackened stone, and it is that debris, spread across a minimum of ten metres here, that constitutes the archaeological record.

The site sits on the northern side of a stream, which is entirely typical. Fulachta fiadh are almost always found near water, since a reliable supply was essential to the whole process. A 1936 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a small mound, clearly visible enough at that point to be worth marking. By around 1976, however, local accounts suggest the mound had been levelled, most likely in the course of agricultural work. What had survived for perhaps three thousand years was gone within a generation. The site is not an isolated one; it belongs to a cluster of six fulachta fiadh in the immediate area, which is itself a common pattern. These sites tend to appear in groups, suggesting repeated use of a favoured stretch of ground over long periods, or perhaps different episodes of activity drawing on the same water source.