It measures roughly 8 metres along its longer axis, with an opening facing west-south-west, and to a casual eye might look like little more than a dark stain in the earth. But this is a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, and its location beside a water source is entirely deliberate. A fulacht fia is essentially a cooking or heating site, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water rapidly to the boil. The characteristic horseshoe or kidney shape is formed by the accumulated mound of discarded, heat-shattered stone that builds up around the trough over repeated use.

What makes the Ightermurragh example particularly interesting is not so much the monument itself as the company it keeps. This is one of four fulachta fiadh recorded in the same field, with a roughly circular patch of dark brown material visible about 40 metres to the west adding a fifth point of interest to the immediate vicinity. Clustering of this kind is not unheard of, but it does raise questions about whether this was a site of unusually intensive or prolonged activity, or whether separate episodes of use, perhaps separated by generations, happened to settle on the same fertile ground beside the same stream. The dates of these monuments are not recorded in the available description, though fulachta fiadh are generally associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, across Ireland.