It measures roughly nine metres across at its widest and rises only about thirty centimetres from the ground, the kind of feature that could easily be dismissed as a natural irregularity in the land. But the material it is made from tells a different story: the mound consists almost entirely of burnt and fire-cracked stone, the characteristic residue of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date, though some examples are earlier or later. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, a process repeated until whatever was being cooked, most likely meat, was done. The spent, shattered stones were raked aside after each use, and over time this accumulated debris formed the distinctive horseshoe or crescent shape, with the open end facing the trough. At Gortavehy, that opening is about two and a half metres wide and faces north-north-east. What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is that it does not stand alone: two further fulachta fiadh lie to the northwest, suggesting that this stretch of river margin was a place people returned to, or where several communities overlapped, over a long period of prehistoric use. The proximity to the Owennagloor River is entirely typical; these sites almost always appear close to a reliable water source, which was as essential to the process as the fire itself.