The feature is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric burnt mound found widely across Ireland and Britain. The term refers to the characteristic spread of heat-shattered stone left behind after repeated cycles of heating rocks in a fire and plunging them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The practice is associated with cooking, though brewing, hide-working, and bathing have all been proposed as possibilities.

This particular example came to light during archaeological monitoring carried out as part of the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme between 2001 and 2002, and was subsequently fully excavated. What the excavators found was modest in scale: a low mound measuring roughly 3.6 metres north to south and 7.4 metres east to west, no more than ten centimetres deep at its highest point, and already disturbed before the archaeologists arrived. A field drain had cut through its eastern and southern edges, removing whatever once lay there. A smaller, isolated deposit of charcoal-rich material was recorded about five metres to the north-east of the main spread. Unusually, no trough was identified, which is often the defining feature of these sites. The finds were sparse: a single chert flake and five fragments of animal bone too degraded to identify. A radiocarbon date obtained from a charcoal sample placed activity at the site in the early Late Bronze Age, consistent with the wider pattern of fulacht fia use in Ireland. Notably, a second burnt mound was located just 25 metres to the north, suggesting this quiet hillside margin was a place people returned to, or at least that two separate groups found it equally suited to the same purpose.