They are easy to overlook, and that is rather the point. These are the remnants of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, particularly in low-lying or waterlogged ground near a water source. The typical arrangement involved a trough dug into the earth, filled with water, and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The broken, burnt stones were then discarded to the side, building up over time into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today.

The Bawnmore site preserves two adjacent mounds of this burnt material, one measuring roughly seven metres by four metres and standing about half a metre high, the other somewhat smaller at four and a half metres by two metres and slightly lower. The pair were already visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, recorded there as a roughly circular mound, suggesting the site was recognisable to surveyors even then. Fulachtaí fia are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though the term itself is an Old Irish one meaning something close to "cooking place of the deer" or "cooking place of the wild", and the sites have attracted considerable debate about whether their use was purely culinary, ceremonial, or something else entirely. Their proximity to water, including wells, streams, and marshy ground, is a consistent pattern across thousands of known examples in Ireland.