That kind of clustering is not unusual for fulachtaí fia, the horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone that are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet it still prompts questions about why people returned repeatedly to the same patch of ground, generation after generation, to do whatever it was they did here. The site recorded in the inventory measures about seven metres north to south and five metres east to west, an irregular spread of burnt and shattered stone that is the defining signature of the type.

A fulacht fia is essentially the spoil heap left behind by a cooking technology. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the cracked and spent stones being raked aside to form the characteristic mound. The three sites at Gurteennacloona lie roughly two hundred and fifty metres south of a stream, which would have provided the water supply that this method requires. All three were still unexcavated at the time they were formally catalogued, so their precise dates remain uncertain, though fulachtaí fia generally belong to the Bronze Age. One of the three was noted by a researcher named Bowman as far back as 1934, suggesting the mounds were visible above ground at that point, though tillage over the intervening decades may have reduced what is now visible at the surface.