The scatter of scorched material, at least twelve metres across, is all that remains of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. These low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone are thought to date mainly from the Bronze Age and are generally interpreted as outdoor cooking sites, where water in a timber or stone trough was heated by dropping in stones fired in a nearby hearth. Thousands survive across Ireland; many more, like this one, do not.

The mound at Gortmolire was recorded by Bowman as early as 1934, which means it was still a recognisable earthwork at that point, visible enough to merit documentation. By 1956, according to local information, it had been levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement work of the kind that quietly removed a great many low earthworks across the Irish countryside during the mid-twentieth century. What the plough and the bulldozer left behind is the burnt spread itself, the residue of repeated heating and discarding of stone that accumulated over what may have been a long period of use. Notably, a second fulacht fia lies roughly 170 metres to the west, suggesting that this stretch of Gortmolire was returned to repeatedly, perhaps across generations, for whatever purpose these sites served.