It is neither. The dark, crumbly material it is made of is burnt stone and charcoal, the accumulated waste of prehistoric cooking activity that took place here perhaps three or four thousand years ago. This is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, and the Ballygown example is one of three clustered together in the same area.

A fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones surrounding a sunken trough, usually timber-lined and filled with water. Stones were heated in a fire and dropped into the trough to bring the water to a boil, and meat was cooked in the resulting heat. The cracked, spent stones were then discarded to the side, building up the characteristic mound over repeated use. The Ballygown site preserves this signature in its burnt material, though the mound has been partially levelled over time, most likely through centuries of agricultural activity. That three such sites occur in close proximity here is itself of some interest; clusters of fulachta fiadh are sometimes interpreted as evidence of repeated seasonal activity, or of a landscape that was particularly well suited to their use, often near water sources.