These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are essentially the remains of ancient cooking places, typically comprising a mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal beside a trough that would once have been filled with water, heated by dropping in stones from a fire. The process is remarkably efficient, and experimental archaeology has shown that a substantial quantity of water can be brought to the boil in a matter of minutes using this method. They date most commonly to the Bronze Age, though some examples span a broader range, and their precise function has been debated, with proposals ranging from communal cooking to bathing to industrial processes such as textile preparation.

The Killawillin example survives as a spread of burnt material visible in tillage, which is to say that ploughing has disturbed and flattened what might once have been a more pronounced mound, scattering the characteristic blackened, heat-shattered stones across the soil surface. This kind of visibility in cultivated ground is, ironically, often how such sites are identified, with the dark spreads of charcoal-rich earth and fractured stone catching the eye against the turned soil. The record for this site derives from the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 2, covering East and South Cork, published in 1994.