The feature at the centre of it was a burnt mound, a type of site found across Ireland and Britain that typically consists of a heap of fire-cracked stones accumulated beside a trough or pit. The leading theory is that such mounds were used for cooking or bathing, with stones heated in a fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to a boil. After repeated use, the shattered, heat-spent stones were discarded into a characteristic mound nearby.

When archaeologist Goorik Dehaene excavated the site as part of the N11 road improvement scheme, what emerged was not just the mound itself but a cluster of associated features: stakeholes and pits that suggest some kind of structure or organised activity around the main deposit. Three flint flakes were recovered from the site, and while flint is not native to this part of Ireland, it was widely traded and worked during the Bronze Age. The presence of those flakes helped place the site within that broad prehistoric period, roughly 2500 to 500 BC, though no finer dating was possible from the excavation record alone.