The site is what archaeologists call a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones surrounding a trough that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping in stones from a nearby fire. How exactly they were used remains a matter of some debate, though cooking is the most widely accepted explanation.

By 1936, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, the site was already being read at a remove, appearing simply as a circular mound rather than anything immediately recognisable as prehistoric. At some point after that, the land passed into commercial use and the mound was sealed beneath concrete, rendering it invisible to the casual eye and largely inaccessible to study. It is not alone in the area: a second fulacht fia lies roughly 140 metres to the south-east, a reminder that these monuments rarely occur in isolation and that the Scarteen landscape, however ordinary it may appear today, was once a place of regular, repeated human activity.