It is about 0.8 metres high, and its full extent cannot be measured beneath the accumulated vegetation. What lies beneath, however, is burnt material, the distinctive signature of a fulacht fia, one of the most widespread yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is, in essence, a Bronze Age cooking or processing site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, and using the resulting hot water for cooking, perhaps for preparing hides, or possibly for brewing. The shattered, heat-cracked stones are then discarded nearby, building up over repeated use into the horseshoe-shaped or irregular mounds that survive today, often close to a water source. The stream beside this example fits that pattern precisely. These sites are found in their thousands across Ireland, dating broadly from the second millennium BC, and Cork has a particularly dense concentration of them. This one, sitting quietly in its field, would have been a practical, workaday place rather than a ceremonial one, its modest mound the accumulated waste of many fires lit and stones cracked over what may have been generations of use. A young coniferous plantation was recorded to the west of the site in 1992, which over time may have altered the immediate landscape around it further.