Together they form a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least-celebrated monument types in the Irish landscape. The term refers to a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a hearth for heating stones, and a mound of discarded burnt and shattered rock that accumulated over repeated use. The broken stones, cracked by thermal shock when dropped into water, are what give these sites their characteristic appearance: dark, irregular spreads that read as gentle humps across open ground.

At Ballygrady, the oval area containing the two mounds measures roughly twenty-six metres by twenty metres. The eastern mound is the larger of the pair, running approximately nineteen and a half metres in length and standing about half a metre high. The western mound is smaller in extent but reaches the same height. The two mounds are aligned roughly east to west, lying side by side within what appears to be a single monument complex. The proximity to a stream is entirely typical of the type, since a reliable water source was essential to the process of heating and filling the trough. A second fulacht fia lies approximately fifty metres to the north-west, suggesting this corner of North Cork saw sustained activity during the Bronze Age, with communities returning to the same general area across generations.