By around 1966, a landowner had levelled the mound entirely, or very nearly so. What survives is a low spread of material, roughly six metres by seven and barely a tenth of a metre high, coloured by the unmistakable signature of repeated burning.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient cooking place found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date, and usually consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough and a water source. The basic principle involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to boiling point, a technique efficient enough to have been used over many centuries. The Kilsarkan example fits the material profile almost perfectly: the burnt black earth and the shattered red stone are the standard residue of this process, accumulated over what may have been many episodes of use. What it conspicuously lacks is any obvious water source nearby, which sets it slightly apart from the typical pattern, since most fulachtaí fia are found close to streams, springs, or boggy ground. Whether a water source once existed and has since disappeared, or whether this site drew on something less obvious, was not resolved when it was surveyed in 1986 by the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey. The levelling that preceded the survey means there is now rather less to work with than there might have been.