It measures roughly 18 metres by 20 metres, an oval smear of scorched earth and fire-cracked stone, and it sits approximately 40 metres north-north-east of a second, similar site. Two of them, so close together, in the same field.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, with County Cork alone containing thousands of recorded examples. The typical form is a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound built up over time from the waste material of repeated use: stones that were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The stones, unable to withstand repeated thermal shock, shatter and become useless, and so they are discarded to the side, gradually forming the characteristic mound. The process was repeated over and over, sometimes over generations, which explains why these modest humps of blackened, fragmented stone can accumulate to a considerable size. What exactly they were used for remains debated; cooking meat is the traditional explanation, but researchers have also proposed brewing, hide-working, bathing, or a combination of uses. Most fulachtaí fia date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some span earlier or later periods. The presence of two sites this close together at Ballycunningham is itself quietly unusual. Whether they represent contemporary use by the same community, sequential phases of activity, or simply the fact that a reliable water source once nearby made the location attractive more than once, is not recorded.