It is only about six to eight metres across and barely forty centimetres high, its sod cover slowly eroding where farm animals have worn at the surface. Where the grass has been scraped away, something older shows through: sandstone fragments embedded in dark grey soil, the kind of discolouration that comes from repeated burning over a very long time.

This is a burnt mound, or fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in great numbers across Ireland, particularly near wetlands and water sources. The name fulacht fia comes from Old Irish and is sometimes translated loosely as a cooking pit of the wild deer, though the exact meaning is debated. The typical arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, and repeating the process until the stones cracked and became unusable. Those discarded fragments built up over generations into the mounds visible today, their dark soil the residue of centuries of ash and charred material. This particular mound sits at the base of a south-east-facing slope, right at the edge of a natural basin of wet ground, exactly the kind of low-lying, waterlogged setting these sites tend to favour. What makes Steelaun especially striking is the density of such remains in a small area: another fulacht fia lies about 150 metres to the north-east, and a further cluster of four burnt mounds sits roughly 130 metres to the north-north-east. Whatever was happening here in prehistory, it was not a one-off occasion.