It measures roughly 34 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, rising just over a metre from the boggy ground, and it is composed almost entirely of burnt stone and charcoal. That combination of materials is the tell. This is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape, and its presence here near the banks of a small river is entirely typical of a tradition that spanned much of prehistory.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is the accumulated debris of an ancient cooking or industrial process. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough, usually timber-lined and sunk into the ground nearby, to bring the water rapidly to the boil. Repeated heating and cooling caused the stones to fracture and crumble, and over time the discarded fragments built up into the distinctive horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive across Ireland in their thousands. The site at Lickadoon sits immediately west of a field boundary, in marshy ground to the north-east of a small river, which is precisely the kind of waterlogged, water-adjacent setting these monuments favour. The proximity to a reliable water source was not incidental; it was the whole point. No specific dates or excavation records are available for this particular mound, but as a class, fulachtaí fia are most commonly associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC.

The mound sits within recently-planted forestry, which means access and visibility will shift considerably as the trees mature. At present, the low canopy and disturbed ground of a young plantation can make cross-country navigation disorienting, and the marshy terrain around the monument means waterproof footwear is strongly advisable. The field boundary immediately to the east provides a useful navigational marker. Once you are at the mound itself, what is worth looking for is the texture of it: the fractured, fire-cracked stone that gives the surface a roughness quite unlike natural glacial deposits or field clearance heaps. The charcoal content, which lends a dark colouration to the matrix, is often visible where the surface has been disturbed by animal activity or root growth.