Measuring just over ten metres long and four and a half metres wide, the spread of dark, burnt material beneath the turf is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in their thousands across Ireland. The name is sometimes translated loosely as "wild deer cooking place", though their precise function has been debated; the prevailing theory is that water was boiled in a trough by repeatedly heating stones in a nearby fire and dropping them in, the shattered and blackened remnants of those stones forming the horseshoe-shaped mound that survives today. They are typically found near water, and the boggy ground here fits that pattern exactly.

What makes Gortknockaneroe quietly remarkable is not any single mound but the clustering of three of them in close proximity. A second fulacht fia lies immediately to the north-east, and a third sits roughly seventy metres to the south-west. Whether they were in use simultaneously, in sequence over generations, or simply represent a location that communities returned to repeatedly across long stretches of prehistory is impossible to say with certainty. That concentration, though, suggests this particular patch of damp north Cork ground was a place of repeated, deliberate activity rather than a chance or isolated find.