It measures roughly eight metres by six, rises no more than forty centimetres above the surrounding ground, and its surface is irregular, slightly humped, the kind of feature a farmer might walk past every day without a second thought. Beneath the turf, however, it is made almost entirely of burnt stone and charcoal, the accumulated waste of repeated prehistoric cooking or heating activity. This is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet quietly puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape.

Fulachtaí fia are generally understood to be Bronze Age cooking sites, though their exact function has been debated for decades. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the ground, filled with water, and then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those stones, once spent and discarded, piled up over generations into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped or irregular mounds that survive today. The burnt and shattered material at Nohaval is the physical residue of that repeated process, compacted over centuries into a modest but legible earthwork. Cork is unusually rich in these monuments, and north Cork in particular has a dense distribution of them, suggesting sustained prehistoric settlement and activity across the region.