It is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking or processing site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The standard interpretation is that these sites functioned as outdoor cooking places, where water was boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough; over repeated use, those stones cracked and shattered, and the discarded fragments accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound that survives today. At Lisheenowen, that mound measures roughly nineteen metres across in both directions and stands just under a metre high, with an opening about six and a half metres wide facing north-northeast.

The site lies about twenty-five metres south of a well, now drained, which would once have supplied the water essential to the whole operation. The proximity is not coincidental; nearly every fulacht fia sits close to a reliable water source, whether a stream, a spring, or a well. What makes this particular spot a little more interesting is that it is not alone. A second fulacht fia stands roughly fifty metres to the north, suggesting that this corner of north Cork saw repeated or sustained activity over time, perhaps by the same community across generations, or perhaps by successive groups drawn to the same reliable water supply.