It is kidney-shaped, as these features almost always are, and retains traces of stone kerbing along its north-western edge. To pass it without knowing what it is would be easy. To know what it is makes it considerably harder to ignore.

The mound is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, with County Cork alone containing thousands of recorded examples. The typical fulacht fia consists of a trough, usually timber-lined or cut into the earth, into which water was poured. Stones were heated in a nearby fire, then dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil. Over time, the repeatedly burnt and shattered stones were raked out and discarded, accumulating into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. The burnt, fragmented material gives these mounds their dark colour and their distinctly spongy texture underfoot. Experiments have shown that a trough of water can be brought to a full boil within minutes using this method. Most fulachta fiadh date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some examples have been found to span a much wider range. What makes the Templebodan site quietly compelling is its setting: placed in boggy, wet ground next to both a stream and a holy well, it sits at the kind of watery, marginal spot that recurs again and again in the Irish prehistoric landscape, where practical needs and ritual significance seem to have overlapped without contradiction.