At its centre is a depression roughly seven metres across, and what may be an opening, just over a metre wide, faces south-east. These are the defining features of a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types found across Ireland, yet one that most people walk past without a second thought.

Fulachtaí fia (the plural form) are generally interpreted as Bronze Age cooking sites, dating broadly from around 1500 BC onward, though their exact function has been debated. The typical arrangement involves a trough dug into the ground, a nearby water source, and a hearth where stones were heated before being dropped into the water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Over repeated use, the stones shatter and become unusable, and the discarded fragments accumulate into the horseshoe-shaped or sub-circular mound that survives today. At Kippagh, the stream lying roughly a hundred metres to the south-west would have supplied exactly the kind of reliable water source these sites required. The burnt material that makes up the mound is the accumulated debris of that long, patient process of heating and cracking stone, repeated across generations.