It measures roughly 13 metres along its longer axis, rises barely 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground, and is softened now by grass and moss. A whitethorn tree grows from it, and a later field wall cuts across it running north to south. Taken alone, it might pass for a natural feature of the boggy lakeshore. It is not.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The typical interpretation is that such sites were used to heat water by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough, bringing it to a boil for cooking meat or, possibly, for other purposes including bathing or the processing of materials. The broken, heat-shattered stones were discarded after use, accumulating over time into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. What makes this particular example at Gortlecka more than just another entry in a long catalogue is its immediate neighbourhood. Within a radius of roughly 135 metres, three further fulachtaí fia have been identified, spaced at roughly 65 to 70 metres apart from one another. The clustering is conspicuous, and the regularity of the spacing only deepens the question of what was happening in this low-lying, flood-prone corner of the Clare landscape in prehistory. Whether this density reflects repeated seasonal use, a particular concentration of activity around the lough, or something else entirely, the site was formally identified in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, drawing on fieldwork annotation made by Tom Coffey in 1994.