It measures roughly fifteen metres across its longest axis and rises only about half a metre above the field, the kind of feature that drainage work and grazing have made easy to overlook. Yet that gentle arc of heat-cracked rock, sitting in charcoal-rich soil, is the signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland and one of the least understood.

A fulacht fia is, at its simplest, a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a cooking or heating process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the liquid to a boil. The stones, repeatedly shocked by the transition from fire to water, fracture and become useless, and so they were raked aside after each use, building up over time into the characteristic horseshoe or crescent shape seen here. The depression towards the south-south-east of this particular mound most likely marks where that trough once sat. These sites are typically found near water, which explains their frequency in low-lying or boggy ground, and this one sits in pasture already cut through by modern drainage channels. A possible second burnt mound lies approximately a hundred metres to the north, which is not unusual; such sites sometimes cluster in areas that offered reliable access to water and fuel over long periods of prehistoric use.