That modest shape is characteristic of a fulacht fia, the Irish term for a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe or crescent of burnt and shattered stone accumulated around a central pit. The form is so common that hundreds are recorded in Cork alone, yet each one represents a small, specific act of life: fire, water, heat, food.

This particular example is one of a cluster of three in the same area, and it was excavated in 1953 by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, whose findings were published the following year. Beneath the mound, he uncovered an oval unlined pit, roughly 1.85 metres long, 1.15 metres wide, and only 0.2 metres deep, still filled with the burnt stone and charred material left over from its final use. The method behind such sites involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled pit to bring the water to boiling point, a technique that leaves behind exactly the kind of cracked, fire-reddened debris found here. What O'Kelly found at Killeens was minimal even by those standards. In his assessment, it was a very temporary site, used perhaps five or six times in all, meaning this particular hollow in the Cork countryside served its purpose on only a handful of occasions before being abandoned, the mound of discarded burnt stone the sole record of whoever stopped here, cooked, and moved on.