It was a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The typical arrangement involved a trough, usually timber-lined or cut into the ground, filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those discarded stones accumulated over repeated use into a horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened, heat-fractured material, and it is exactly this kind of residue that the Shanballymore site preserves, or at least preserved.

The site was recorded by Bowman in 1934, at which point it lay in pasture to the south-west of a well that has since been drained. The proximity to water is typical; fulachtaí fia are almost always found near streams, springs, or wetland margins, since a reliable water source was essential to the whole process. The mound survived in some form for decades after Bowman noted it, but according to local information it was levelled around 1984, leaving only a grass-covered scatter of burnt material where the distinctive raised spread once stood. That flattening is a common fate for such sites, which tend to occupy low-lying agricultural ground and can seem, to the uninformed eye, like nothing more than a slightly boggy rise in a field.