The site sits on a slight rise just northeast of a covered stream, and the mound, measuring roughly 12 metres by 9 metres but now barely a tenth of a metre high, is visibly darker than the surrounding soil. Scattered across its surface are fragments of fire-cracked stone, the diagnostic signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric burnt mound, typically Bronze Age in date, associated with the heating of water by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough. The stones crack and shatter with repeated use, gradually accumulating into the low, horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive in their thousands across Ireland, most commonly in wet or marshy locations close to water. The six examples at Rathpatrick form a roughly linear arrangement along the northeast bank of the stream, spaced at intervals of several tens of metres from one another. Their survival, albeit in a heavily ploughed-out state, was entirely accidental: the very wetness of the ground that would have made the site attractive to prehistoric users in the first place had also, for centuries, kept the field out of intensive agricultural use. Once drainage equipment arrived in 2018, the monuments were exposed almost simultaneously.