The term, loosely translated as "wild deer roasting pits", refers to Bronze Age cooking sites where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The process leaves behind a characteristic crescent or horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered, fire-blackened stone, and it is exactly this kind of monument that sits in rough grazing land at Maulrane in County Cork, just north of a small stream.

The Maulrane example is a well-preserved specimen of the type. The mound measures 15.3 metres in length and 10.7 metres in width, rising to a height of 1.1 metres, with a narrow opening of 0.8 metres facing south towards the watercourse. That southward-facing gap is where the trough would once have sat, drawing on the stream nearby. The horseshoe shape is the accumulated debris of repeated use, the discarded burnt and cracked stones piling up over time into the low, rounded form that survives today. These sites are found in their thousands across Ireland, and the proximity to running water is almost always a defining feature, since a reliable supply was essential to the whole operation. Whether the sites were used primarily for cooking, bathing, textile processing, or some combination of purposes is still a matter of debate among archaeologists, and Maulrane offers no obvious clues beyond its shape and setting.