The mound is a fulacht fia, a class of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The usual arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil, and repeating the process to cook meat. The stones, cracked and reddened by repeated heating and quenching, were discarded into a crescentic mound around the trough, which is precisely what the scorched material here represents.

When the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey recorded the site in 1987, surveyors noted the mound's dimensions as 13.2 metres north to south and 8.3 metres east to west, with the characteristic dark, fire-altered deposit visible in section where turf had been cut nearby. No trough was identifiable at the time of that visit, which is not unusual; timber troughs decay, and stone-lined ones are often buried deeply or disturbed by later peat growth. The 0.3-metre layer of peat overlying the burnt material tells its own quiet story, indicating that the surrounding bog has continued to accumulate over the monument since it was last used, sealing the evidence of whatever meals or processes took place here thousands of years ago.