Stretching roughly 16.5 metres east to west and extending about 10 metres southward from a field fence, it sits as little more than an ill-defined mound of burnt material, easy to overlook and easy to misread as a natural irregularity in the ground.

The feature is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking or industrial site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, with thousands recorded to date. The typical form involves a trough, often timber-lined or cut into the ground, filled with water, which was then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Over repeated use, the shattered, heat-damaged stones accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives in the landscape. The Gortnascregga example retains that mound, though time and agricultural activity have left it low and poorly defined. What these sites were actually used for remains a point of genuine debate among archaeologists; cooking is the most widely accepted explanation, but brewing, hide processing, bathing, and textile work have all been proposed with varying degrees of supporting evidence. Most fulachtaí fia date to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some were in use earlier or later.