It is easy to miss, partly because a drainage channel has cut through it, and partly because centuries of settling and levelling have reduced it to a gentle rise in waterlogged ground. Yet the material underfoot is the residue of a cooking method that was repeated across Ireland for well over a thousand years during the Bronze Age, and possibly into the early medieval period.

A fulacht fia, sometimes translated as "deer roasting pit", is the remains of an ancient outdoor cooking site. The typical arrangement involved a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined, filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The discarded, shattered stones accumulated over time into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that archaeologists recognise today. The Knockane example follows the pattern well: its position beside a spring would have supplied the water essential to the whole process, and the marshy, low-lying ground is exactly the kind of setting these sites favour. Immediately to the south-east lies a circular enclosure, a separate but neighbouring feature that hints at a broader pattern of activity in this part of the landscape, though the relationship between the two structures is not fully documented.