It measures roughly fourteen metres across and rises only a quarter of a metre above the surrounding ground, which is part of why these features so often go unnoticed. What lies beneath the grass is a spread of burnt stone and charcoal, the accumulated debris of repeated heating and cooling over what may have been centuries.

The feature belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a term used to describe the horseshoe-shaped or circular mounds of fire-cracked stone that appear in their thousands across the Irish landscape, particularly in low-lying or waterlogged ground. The accepted interpretation is that these sites were used for cooking by heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, though some researchers have proposed additional uses including textile processing or bathing. Most fulachta fia date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though the type persisted in some areas beyond that period. The sheer density of them in Munster, Cork especially, has made the county something of a focus for the study of prehistoric cooking practices and landscape use. The example at Curraghnalaght, with its circular rather than the more typical horseshoe plan, sits within this broader pattern, a domestic or communal site now reduced to a shallow disc of scorched material in someone's back garden.