These features, found in their thousands across Ireland, are among the most common yet least understood monuments in the landscape. A fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a water source, the by-product of a Bronze Age process in which stones were heated and dropped into a water-filled trough, probably for cooking or possibly for other purposes such as bathing or textile preparation. What made the one at Scrahan slightly more legible than most is now largely gone.

For much of its recorded life, the site retained its characteristic form: a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt material, with the open end of the curve facing westward toward a well. That orientation toward a water source is exactly what archaeologists would expect, since proximity to a reliable spring or stream was essential to how these sites functioned. It was documented by Bowman in 1934, and the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1938 noted a well to the north of the site. Around 1982, however, the mound was levelled, leaving only a grass-covered spread of burnt material in the pasture. The physical shape that made it readable as a monument was erased in the course of ordinary agricultural activity, a fate that has befallen countless similar sites across the country.