It is a fulacht fia, the remains of a Bronze Age cooking site, and what makes it quietly remarkable is that it does not stand alone. Another of the same type lies roughly thirty metres to the southeast, making this a rare pairing of monuments that hints at repeated, perhaps habitual, use of the same waterlogged ground over an extended period.

A fulacht fia, for those unfamiliar with the type, is essentially a prehistoric outdoor cooking facility. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and then dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, allowing meat to be cooked. The trough at Caherbaroul is rectangular and built from stone, and it has been exposed within the mound itself. The mound measures twelve metres in length, eleven metres in width, and survives to a height of half a metre; it is composed largely of the burnt and fractured stone that accumulated over successive uses, a material archaeologists refer to as burnt spread or boiling mound. Around the interior, nineteen stones form a revetment, a lining or retaining wall that would have helped to define and stabilise the structure. P. J. Hartnett, writing in 1939, described the site as a kerb-circle, a term reflecting the arrangement of upright or close-set stones around the perimeter.