The 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet identifies it as a fulacht fia, the term used for a class of prehistoric outdoor cooking place, typically recognised by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charred earth deposited around a water trough. The Shrule example sat in a fold of a south-facing slope, with the headwaters of a north-south stream running immediately to the east, a setting entirely typical of these sites, which relied on a ready water supply.

When field officers visited in 1940, what they found was already a fragment: a scarp of mounded material, charred stone mixed with black earth, emerging from the slope. Its dimensions were recorded at roughly fifteen metres on the northwest-to-southeast axis and nine metres across, with a surviving height of about 1.2 metres at the eastern end. By 1987, that was gone too. A survey that year found nothing visible at ground level, the area by then under pasture. What remained was a piece of local memory: people recalled that when the land was reclaimed around 1960, black earth and cracked stones had come up during the work, the soil itself carrying the evidence that the map had already noted two decades earlier.