A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The stones, shattered from repeated use, were discarded in a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough, and it is these accumulations of burnt stone and charcoal that survive in the ground today, sometimes for three or four thousand years.

The mound at Cummery Connell is oval in plan, measuring roughly 8.1 metres east to west and 5.4 metres north to south, and rises to about half a metre above the surrounding pasture. It is overgrown now, the burnt material beneath softened by turf and vegetation into something that could easily be mistaken for a natural rise in the field. The proximity to a stream is characteristic; fulachtaí fia are almost always found near a reliable water source, which was essential to the whole operation. Thousands of these sites have been recorded across Ireland, with Cork among the counties most densely populated by them, yet each individual example tends to sit quietly in a field, unmarked and unannounced, its domestic prehistoric purpose thoroughly disguised by time.