It is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in their thousands across Ireland, typically identified by the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone that accumulates when hot rocks are repeatedly dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. What makes this particular example quietly remarkable is its position: it presses directly against the outer face of the axial stone of a multiple-stone circle. The axial stone is the recumbent slab placed on the south-west arc of such circles, usually the lowest and most deliberately oriented stone in the arrangement, and this fulacht fia was built so close to it that the two monuments are effectively touching.

The proximity of the cooking mound to the stone circle is striking on its own, but the broader landscape compounds the strangeness. Three boulder-burials, a form of megalithic monument in which a large boulder is supported above the ground on smaller stones and associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, lie just five metres to the south-west. Whether the fulacht fia was constructed before or after the circle, or whether its builders understood the stone circle as a meaningful landmark, cannot be determined from the physical remains alone. What survives is a mound measuring roughly 6.4 metres north-west to south-east and 6.6 metres north-east to south-west, standing just over half a metre high, clustered into a small area of rough pasture alongside monuments of ceremony and burial. The concentration of distinct monument types within such a tight space suggests this slope above the Cloonee and Inchiquin lake valley held some sustained significance during the Bronze Age, though precisely what that significance was has not come down to us.