It is a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, and yet one of the least obviously dramatic. These sites, found in their thousands across the country, are essentially the debris from ancient cooking or industrial hearths, typically Bronze Age in origin, where stones were repeatedly heated and plunged into water-filled troughs until they cracked and split. The accumulated waste formed characteristic horseshoe-shaped spreads of blackened, fire-shattered stone, and it is precisely this burnt residue that survives at Gurteenard, visible at the surface as a gentle, darkened rise in an otherwise ordinary field.

When archaeologists visited the site in 1976, the field happened to be under the plough, which revealed considerably more than the mound alone. Alongside the fulacht fia, two low parallel earthen banks running on a north-west to south-east axis were recorded, along with other less distinct surface variations at right angles to them, lying to the south and south-west. The relationship between these earthen banks and the fulacht fia was not fully resolved, and the phrase used at the time, "ill-defined surface variations", captures something of the frustrating ambiguity that often surrounds such sites. Since that visit, the banks appear to have been levelled, whether by continued cultivation or land management. Only slight undulations on a north-east to south-west axis remain detectable in the field today, and the aerial photograph that first drew attention to the site records it as a soilmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in the earth that only becomes legible from altitude and under the right conditions of light and moisture.