A fulacht fia is a type of ancient cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal built up around a trough that would have been filled with water and heated using stones from a fire. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, making them one of the most common prehistoric monument types on the island, yet this particular example has an extra layer of loss to it. According to local information, the mound was levelled around 1969, leaving only the undulating grass-covered scatter of burnt material that survives today.

The levelling of the Knockskehy mound sometime in the late 1960s was not an unusual fate for such sites. Agricultural improvement, land drainage, and general tidying of fields claimed a significant number of fulachtaí fia throughout the twentieth century, often before their significance was widely understood locally. What had looked to generations of farmers like an inconvenient boggy hump was in fact the accumulated debris of repeated prehistoric use, most likely dating to the Bronze Age. The burnt and shattered stones, fire-cracked through repeated heating and quenching in water, give these sites their other common name, burnt mounds. At Knockskehy, even after the deliberate levelling, enough of that material remained visible as a spread across the ground to allow the site to be recorded.