Where a mound once rose two feet above a pasture field, recent land reclamation has levelled the ground so thoroughly that nothing remains to see. The absence itself is worth noting, because what was here belonged to a category of monument that survives in considerable numbers across Ireland, even if this particular example has not.

A fulacht fia is a burnt mound, typically the accumulated debris of repeated outdoor cooking over many centuries during the Bronze Age. The method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, cracking the stones in the process. Over time the shattered, fire-reddened fragments built up into a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound, usually situated close to a water source. At Gortavehy, the mound sat on the northern side of a well, and when a researcher named Broker recorded it in 1937, it measured roughly fifteen yards long by ten yards wide, with the well apparently flowing from within it or immediately beside it. The site was on land belonging to a James Sullivan at that time. That brief 1937 description is now the only real record of what stood here, since subsequent reclamation work has removed any trace of the surface mound entirely.