The one at Maghasheela, in County Kerry, is a quiet representative of a type that has puzzled researchers for generations. These low, horseshoe-shaped mounds, typically found near streams or boggy ground, are the burnt and discarded remains of ancient cooking sites, where stones were repeatedly heated in fire and plunged into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. The stones crack and shatter with the thermal shock, and it is the accumulated debris of those fractured, fire-reddened fragments that forms the characteristic mound.

The majority of fulachtaí fia in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some examples have been shown to predate or postdate that period. The name itself is somewhat contested; it translates loosely from the Irish as something like "cooking place of the wild" or "cooking pit of the deer", and while the cooking interpretation is now widely accepted, earlier theories ranged from communal bathing to textile dyeing to brewing. Kerry has a particularly dense concentration of these sites, a reflection both of the county's rich prehistoric activity and the survival of upland and boggy terrain that has kept the mounds from being ploughed away. Maghasheela, whose name likely derives from the Irish "Machaire Síle", meaning Sheila's plain or level ground, sits within a landscape that would have been intimately familiar to the communities who used such sites.

Because detailed records for this particular site are limited at present, it is difficult to give precise information about its dimensions, condition, or exact setting. What can be said is that anyone walking Kerry's rural margins with an eye for low, dark, peaty mounds near water is quite possibly looking at the same type of monument, one of the most tangible connections remaining to the everyday domestic life of Bronze Age Ireland.