The site in question is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a water trough. Fulachta fia are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains debated; cooking, bathing, and industrial processes have all been proposed. What makes this particular example unusual is not the monument itself but its setting: at least six fulachta fia have been recorded within roughly 100 metres of this spot, and two of them sit close enough together that an excavator described them as a single double site.

In 1955, the archaeologist Prendergast partially excavated this mound and its immediate neighbour, opening a cutting that ran across the shallow hollow separating them. What she found was striking in its detail. The characteristic black layer of burnt stone, charcoal, and ash that defines these monuments faded out at the edge of the first mound and reappeared only at the edge of the second, with no trace of a pit in the intervening ground. Small pits dug into the subsoil on the verge of each mound were packed with burnt debris, and wherever such a pit appeared in the second mound, a heaped patch of yellow clay lay close beside it. The stratigraphy within the black layer was consistent across every cutting: scorched grey stones near the top, increasingly brittle and broken stones with more charcoal below, and at the very bottom a compressed layer of black charcoal with no stones at all. The stones throughout were sandstone. The second mound was somewhat larger in footprint than the first but lower in profile, and the yellow clay between the burnt layer and the underlying marl gave the deposit a distinctly banded appearance when cut through. Today none of this is visible at ground level; the field has been reclaimed and the mounds offer nothing to the surface eye.