These are the remains of ancient cooking sites, typically Bronze Age in date, recognised by their characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone. The accepted explanation for how they worked involves heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, a method that leaves behind enormous quantities of cracked, fire-reddened stone. That residue, accumulated over repeated use, forms the low mound that survives in the ground today.

Fulachtaí fia, as they are known in the plural, appear in their thousands across Ireland, and Kilkenny has its share. The townland name Columbkille recalls Saint Columba, the sixth-century monk associated with Iona and with a scattering of place-names across Ireland that mark early ecclesiastical influence. Whether this particular site has any connection to that broader landscape of early medieval activity is not known, and the fulacht fia itself almost certainly predates any such associations by well over a thousand years. Bronze Age cooking sites of this type were in use roughly between 1500 and 500 BC, though individual sites vary considerably, and without excavation the precise date of this one remains uncertain.