It sits close to a townland boundary, roughly forty metres south of a forestry plantation, and to the untrained eye it would read as nothing more than a slight rise in the ground. In fact, it is a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking sites scattered across the Irish landscape, and one that remained officially unrecorded until the twenty-first century.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is a Bronze Age feature typically found near water or marshy ground. The general principle involves heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and using that heated water for cooking, and possibly other purposes such as textile processing or bathing. Over time the cracked and spent stones accumulate into a distinctive horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound around the trough. The site on the Morningstar River fits this pattern closely. It was identified in 2006 by archaeologist Enda Mahony during an archaeological assessment carried out in advance of planned afforestation in the area. Mahony recorded it as a horseshoe or U-shaped mound with an opening 1.5 metres wide facing west. The mound measures four metres in external diameter and rises to between half a metre and three-quarters of a metre above the surrounding ground level, modest dimensions that are fairly typical of the type.

Because no surface remains are visible on satellite imagery, finding this site requires some local knowledge and a reasonable tolerance for soft ground near a river margin. The Morningstar River forms the townland boundary between Newtown and Knockaunavlyman at this point, which gives a useful navigational reference. A location map compiled by Emmet Byrnes accompanies the site record and would be worth consulting before visiting. The mound itself is inconspicuous enough that a visitor could pass within a short distance without noticing it, which makes the 2006 identification all the more worthwhile. Sites like this are frequently encountered only when development or land-use change prompts a formal survey, and without that afforestation assessment, this particular fulacht fia might have remained unacknowledged indefinitely.