Beneath it lay one of the better-preserved examples of a fulacht fia to be excavated in County Cork, a type of site found in great numbers across Ireland and generally understood as an outdoor cooking place, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point. The mound itself, the characteristic calling card of these sites, is the accumulated debris of those heat-shattered stones, discarded after repeated use and cracking.

Excavation ahead of the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass revealed the internal arrangement in some detail. At the centre was a horseshoe-shaped hearth, formed from two or three courses of low stone walling enclosing an area roughly 2.3 metres east to west and 1.5 metres north to south, open to the east and marked at each end by a post-hole. Immediately east of the hearth sat the trough, a pit lined with rubble stone walling, its eastern side clipped by later drainage works. Within it survived the remains of an oak trough at least three metres long, made by splitting an oak trunk lengthways and hollowing out one half, in much the same manner as a dugout canoe. Two grooves cut into its underside near the western end were interpreted as fittings for ropes, suggesting the trough could be dragged or repositioned as needed. Dendrochronological analysis, which uses the annual growth rings of timber to establish felling dates, placed the tree's cutting at around 1535 BC, give or take nine years. Charcoal from the hearth returned a radiocarbon date of around 1409 BC, somewhat later, which points to the trough having been made elsewhere or earlier and brought into use here only afterwards. A second fulacht fia was excavated roughly thirty metres to the south-east, on the opposite side of the stream, suggesting this narrow glen saw sustained activity across the middle Bronze Age.