The one at Moneygurney, in County Cork, is typical in its quiet anonymity, a low, horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone sitting in the landscape with little to announce its age or purpose. These mounds are the accumulated debris of repeated heating: stones were placed in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and the cracked, spent stones were piled to the side after each use. Over generations, the discarded material built up into the distinctive shape that field surveyors still recognise today.

Most fulachtaí fia date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some sites show use extending into the early medieval period. The name itself is Old Irish, sometimes translated loosely as "cooking place of the deer" or "cooking pit of the wild animal," though what exactly was being cooked, or whether cooking was even the primary function, remains a matter of debate among archaeologists. Some researchers have proposed uses ranging from food preparation and textile dyeing to bathing and brewing. The Moneygurney example sits within a county that has produced an exceptionally dense concentration of these monuments, Cork's wet, low-lying ground having preserved the organic and stone remains that drier soils elsewhere might have dispersed.