Fulachtaí fia are Bronze Age cooking sites, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone surrounding a trough that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping fire-heated stones into it. They tend to cluster in damp, low-lying areas, and this one, sitting between the 400 and 500 foot contours at Knockans, fits the pattern precisely.

What makes this particular site worth noting is less what remains than what nearly did not. When Ann Lynch and Tom Coffey filed their reports, the basis for the site's inclusion in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, Lynch recorded that a bulldozer had recently torn through the mound during ground clearance for a farm track. The damage was extensive enough that the fulacht fia survived only as a denuded oval, roughly 15 metres by 12 metres, of disturbed black earth and stone. Two portions escaped the worst of it: a section at the north-north-west end, about 4.5 metres long and a metre high, with several large loose burnt stones resting on top, and a shorter section at the south-south-east, where briars and blackthorns had taken hold. Those large displaced stones may originally have lined the water trough at the heart of the monument. When the site was inspected again in 1999, burnt stone and ash still lay spread across the bulldozed trackway for some nine metres to the south-south-east, and a scatter of wildflowers, silverweed, black knapweed, daisy, red clover and buttercup, had colonised the disturbed ground.