Partially overgrown, it measures fourteen metres across in both directions and rises only about forty-five centimetres from the surrounding ground. What makes it worth a second look is not its height but its company: two more mounds of the same kind lie within a hundred metres to the south, spaced at intervals of roughly seventy metres apart.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet the mechanics behind them are still debated. The general understanding is that they functioned as cooking sites, most likely during the Bronze Age, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that typically surrounds such a site is the accumulated debris of those cracked and discarded stones, often darkened by the heat and mixed with charcoal. The brown earth extending from the southern side of the Killeenemer mound, in a smaller rise measuring five by three metres, may represent a distinct feature associated with the trough or working area. Whether any of the three sites here were in use simultaneously, or represent repeated activity across different periods, is the kind of question the surface alone cannot answer. Their clustering along a stream corridor is not unusual; water was a functional necessity, and low-lying, well-watered ground attracted repeated use. Finding three within a hundred metres of one another, though, is a quiet reminder that this particular stretch of North Cork was once a good deal busier than it appears today.