It is, in fact, the surviving portion of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and most puzzling monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, characterised by a water-filled trough and a surrounding mound built up over time from the cracked, fire-shattered stones discarded after repeated heating. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, almost always near water, and this one near Cappamore proved no exception to that pattern.

The site came to light in 2000 during a flood relief scheme carried out by the Office of Public Works on the Mulkear River. The work required widening the river and cutting new diversion channels, and all groundworks were monitored for archaeological remains. When a new channel was being excavated north of Cappamore, the southern edge of the mound was exposed and subsequently recorded and partly excavated by archaeologist Jacinta Kiely of Eachtra Archaeological Projects. What the excavation revealed was substantial. A large trough, roughly circular in plan, measured approximately 2.08 metres by 4.41 metres and reached 1.32 metres in depth, and it had been cut below the water-table, meaning it would have filled naturally with groundwater. Ten distinct fills were identified within it. At the base, timbers had survived, alongside hazelnuts, hazelnut shells, charcoal, and animal bone, the kind of assemblage that hints at sustained, repeated activity rather than a single occasion. The mound itself, composed of nine burnt spreads of sandy clay laden with 50 to 70 per cent burnt sandstone fragments, measured 4 metres by 19 metres in the excavated section alone. The remainder of the mound, estimated at roughly 14 metres by 21 metres, lay outside the works and was left undisturbed.

The unexcavated portion of the mound remains visible as a low earthwork to the north of the wayleave. It sits in agricultural land, and there is no formal visitor infrastructure. The general area north of Cappamore village is accessible by road, but the mound itself is on private land, so any visit would require local enquiry beforehand. What makes the site worth knowing about is less any single dramatic feature than the quiet accumulation of evidence: ten fills, nine burnt spreads, timbers preserved below the water-table for millennia, and the simple fact that more than half of it remains unexcavated and underground.