It is the kind of thing that could be mistaken for an old dump or a patch of disturbed ground, yet it is almost certainly the remains of a fulacht fia, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is thought to be a prehistoric cooking or processing site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a water source. The stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough, where they raised the temperature enough to cook meat or, as some researchers have proposed, to process hides, brew ale, or serve as a form of sauna. The cracked, heat-shattered stones were then discarded to the side, building up the characteristic mound over repeated use.

What makes Skarragh particularly worth noting is not the single site in isolation but the cluster it forms. Within roughly three and a half metres of the first mound lie two further examples, one at about 1.4 metres to the south and another at approximately 3.4 metres beyond that. Three fulachtaí fia in such close proximity, all positioned along the same stream bank, suggests this was not a one-off camp but a location returned to repeatedly, perhaps over generations. The proximity to running water is characteristic; a reliable stream was essential for filling the trough and cooling the stones. Whether the three mounds were in simultaneous or sequential use is impossible to say without excavation, but their tight grouping along a single watercourse gives the site an unusual density that sets it apart from the many solitary examples recorded across Cork and the wider country.