This is a fulacht fia, a type of site found in the hundreds across the Irish countryside, usually close to a water source, and dating in most cases to the Bronze Age. The typical arrangement involves a trough, often timber-lined or cut into the earth, which was filled with water and then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, once spent, were raked out and piled to the side, and it is precisely these crescent-shaped mounds of shattered, heat-reddened stone that survive in the landscape today.

At Manch, the site sits on a break in a north-north-west-facing slope, in what was recently reclaimed pasture at the time it was recorded. The burnt material is visible along the streambank, the residue of repeated episodes of heating and discard. What these sites were actually used for remains a matter of debate among archaeologists; cooking is the long-standing explanation, but experimental work has raised the possibility that they also served for bathing, textile processing, or other tasks requiring quantities of hot water. The landscape context here is fairly typical: a slope, a stream, open ground where activity could take place without obstruction.