It measures roughly thirty metres along its north-east to south-west axis and eighteen metres across, with its opening facing north-west. To a passing eye it might look like little more than a slight rise in the field, but its shape and contents mark it out as a fulacht fia, one of the most common and still somewhat mysterious monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape.

Fulachtaí fia, the plural form, are prehistoric cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland and dating broadly to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC. The typical arrangement involves a trough, often timber-lined or stone-lined, dug into the ground near a water source, into which heated stones were dropped to boil water. Those stones, once shattered by the repeated thermal shock of heating and cooling, were discarded to the side, building up over time into the characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of dark, charred, and fragmented material that survives today. The opening of the mound, here facing north-west, generally corresponds to where the trough itself was positioned. Exactly what was being cooked, or whether these sites served other purposes entirely, such as bathing or textile processing, remains a matter of ongoing debate among archaeologists.