The location is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site found in their thousands across Ireland, typically identified by a mound of burnt and shattered stone left behind after repeated heating and quenching in water. They are most often found in low-lying, wet ground, which makes the marshy setting here at Curraghnalaght entirely characteristic.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937 as a circular mound, which is the classic surface signature of an undisturbed fulacht fia, where centuries of discarded burnt stone gradually accumulate into a low horseshoe or oval shape. What survives today is less defined: a spread of burnt material rather than a clear mound, its position betrayed mainly by the ring of rushes growing around it, the kind of dense, coarse vegetation that tends to colonise ground that holds water. The surrounding marshy conditions that would have made the site useful to its prehistoric users are, in a quiet way, still doing the work of preserving what little remains.