It is, in fact, a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. These mounds, built up from cracked and fire-blackened stone, are the accumulated debris of repeated episodes of fire-setting and water-heating, most likely used for cooking during the Bronze Age. The stone fragments shatter when heated and then plunged into water, and over generations the discarded material accumulates into the characteristic horseshoe or circular mound that survives today. The Kilcolman example measures roughly fourteen metres across and stands 1.4 metres high, which places it among the more substantial surviving examples.

A local reference from 1934 adds a small, tantalising detail. Bowman, writing that year, recorded that a stone trough, approximately four feet long, one and a half feet wide, and one foot deep, had been found here some years earlier. Such troughs are thought to be the actual vessels into which heated stones were dropped to bring water to the boil, and their discovery is relatively uncommon in intact or undisturbed condition. Bowman noted, however, that the mound itself appeared to have been left untouched, suggesting that whatever ground disturbance produced the trough did not extend to the wider site. Roughly thirty metres to the south-south-west lies a holy well, a proximity that is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where ancient water sources of different periods and purposes often cluster around the same reliable spring or stream.