It is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or industrial site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough, a hearth, and the accumulated debris of repeated burning. The method is thought to have involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled pit to bring it to the boil; the stones, cracking and fracturing with the thermal shock, were then discarded in a heap, and it is that heap which survives as the characteristic mound.

At Maulagowna the mound measures roughly seven metres along its northeast to southwest axis and just over three metres across, rising to a modest thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Its opening, about a metre and a half wide, faces southeast, a feature consistent with the horseshoe form seen at many similar sites. Where the southwest arm of the mound has been worn down over time, fragments of the burnt and fire-cracked stone are visible at the surface, offering a small physical window into the material that makes up the whole structure. The boggy pasture that now surrounds it is, in a way, part of the story: fulachta fiadh are overwhelmingly found in low-lying, wet ground, close to a reliable water source, which in this case the surrounding landscape of the Lough Inchiquin valley readily provides.