It is not much to look at from a distance, which is precisely why thousands of similar monuments have been quietly overlooked across the Irish countryside for centuries. This is a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking site found in enormous numbers throughout Ireland, typically near a water source. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing the water rapidly to the boil and allowing meat to be cooked. The characteristic mound that survives today is simply the accumulated debris of that process, the discarded burnt and shattered stones piled up after each use over what may have been many generations.

The Kilmeany example is a reasonably substantial one. Its external diameter runs to roughly 15 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west, and it still stands about 0.7 metres above the surrounding ground at its highest point. Within the open side of the horseshoe, in the west-northwest sector, the depression that would once have held the cooking trough measures approximately 6.9 metres by 8.3 metres and survives to a depth of around 0.6 metres. These dimensions were recorded as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, compiled by C. Toal and published in 1995, which brought systematic documentation to a part of the country where prehistoric remains had often gone unrecorded. The fact that burnt stones remain visible at exposed sections suggests the mound has not been heavily disturbed, even if the centuries have softened its outline considerably.