These low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-blackened earth are generally understood to represent the debris of repeated water-heating, in which stones were heated in a fire and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil. What they were used for, whether cooking, bathing, or something else entirely, remains a matter of active discussion among archaeologists. The example at Inchanappa, in County Wicklow, is one of three such monuments identified close together in the same area, which already sets it apart from a chance, isolated find.

The Inchanappa fulacht fia came to light during archaeological monitoring in 2004, as part of work carried out under Excavation Licence 04E1334, and was subsequently excavated the following year. When fully recorded, it proved to be a roughly circular burnt-mound deposit measuring thirteen metres by fifteen metres and surviving to a depth of around thirty centimetres, a modest but legible presence in the ground. Beneath it, two pits interpreted as troughs had been sealed by the accumulated mound material over millennia. A radiocarbon date obtained from one of those troughs placed the site in the Early Bronze Age, broadly the period from around 2500 to 1500 BC, confirming that people were using this spot for fire and water some four thousand years ago. The proximity of two further fulachtaí fia in the same landscape suggests this was not an incidental or one-off activity, but a place people returned to, or at least a locality where such work was carried out on some scale.