A fulacht fia, the term used for a class of prehistoric burnt mound found widely across Ireland, would once have been a working installation: a trough filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled, used for cooking meat or, as some researchers have argued, for brewing or textile processing. Thousands of these sites survive across the Irish landscape, often as low horseshoe-shaped mounds of shattered, blackened stone. The Kippagh example is no longer one of them.

By 1938, when the Ordnance Survey recorded the area at six-inch scale, the site still registered as a mound, with a spring noted on its north-eastern side. That spring is worth remarking on: fulachta fia are almost invariably found near a reliable water source, which would have been essential to their function. The proximity of a natural spring at Kippagh fits the pattern precisely. At some point after that mid-twentieth-century survey, the mound was levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement of the pasture land in which it sat. Nothing visible now marks the spot.