A fulacht fia is a type of ancient outdoor cooking place, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone built up over centuries of repeated use beside a water source, where stones heated in a fire would be dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. These sites are extraordinarily common across Ireland, particularly in Cork and Kerry, and most date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC. What is less common is finding one that has been actively flattened within living memory.

According to local information, the mound at Ummeraboy was levelled in 1981, most likely in the course of agricultural improvement work, the kind of land clearance that accompanied the drainage and reclamation schemes that reshaped much of the Irish countryside in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The physical monument is gone in any meaningful sense, but the material evidence persists in the soil and at the margins of the field drains, where burnt stone continues to erode out. The site does not stand alone; a second fulacht fiadh lies approximately 200 metres to the southwest, a proximity that is not unusual. These sites frequently cluster, either because the same water source or patch of ground was returned to over generations, or because adjacent communities used nearby locations independently over the same broad period.