It is twelve metres wide and just over half a metre high, the kind of feature that a passing walker might take for a slight rise in the ground. In fact it is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by exactly this signature: a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound of shattered stone, dark with charring, accumulated over repeated episodes of use.

The principle behind a fulacht fia is straightforward. Water was heated by dropping stones, fired in a nearby hearth, directly into a trough. The thermal shock shattered the stones over time, and the broken, blackened fragments were raked aside into the mound that survives today. The proximity of this example to a well is entirely typical; fulachta fiadh are almost always found near a reliable water source, and the clustering of them in particular landscapes suggests some areas were used with some regularity across long stretches of prehistoric time. This site at Curraghs is thought to be one of a group of ten in the area recorded by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, a detail that makes the landscape around it feel less incidental and more purposeful, though the exact nature of that purpose, cooking, brewing, textile processing, or some combination, continues to be debated by archaeologists.