These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, are generally interpreted as ancient cooking places, typically Bronze Age in date, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The stones, rendered useless by repeated heating and cooling, were discarded into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened, fragmented rock. It is exactly this kind of spread that has been noted at Pluckanes, visible as a dark stain in ground that was once wetland or marginal land before being brought into agricultural use.

The reclamation of the pasture surrounding the site is itself part of the story. Fulachtaí fia, as they are known in the plural, tend to cluster in low-lying, poorly drained ground, and the draining and improvement of such land across Cork and elsewhere has both obscured many sites and, paradoxically, made others easier to identify from the surface. The burnt mound at Pluckanes survives as a spread rather than a well-defined mound, which suggests some degree of disturbance or dispersal over time, whether through ploughing, land improvement, or simple erosion. Without excavation it is difficult to say more about its date or the precise nature of the activities that took place there, though the Bronze Age association holds for the majority of similar sites recorded across Munster.