These are the remains of ancient cooking places, typically Bronze Age in date, formed around a trough dug into the ground and filled with water. Stones were heated in a nearby fire and dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil, and the repeated cycle of heating and cracking left a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of shattered, fire-reddened stone around the pit. Ireland has thousands of them, scattered across wet lowlands and river margins, and yet most pass entirely unnoticed.

Fulachtaí fia, as a class of monument, date predominantly from the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some have produced earlier or later dates. The name itself is of uncertain origin, sometimes translated loosely as "cooking place of the deer" or associated with wandering hunter-warriors in medieval Irish literature, though their true function has been debated by archaeologists for decades. Cooking is the most widely accepted explanation, but proposals have included brewing, textile processing, and bathing. The Kerry landscape is particularly dense with such sites, given the county's abundance of the boggy, water-retentive ground these features favour. The specific example at Mullen has not yet been subject to published excavation or detailed field recording in the public domain, so its precise dimensions, condition, and immediate landscape context remain undocumented here.