Roughly horseshoe-shaped, it measures around twelve metres long, eighteen metres wide, and rises to about a metre in height, with an opening of approximately three metres facing south. The mound is composed of burnt material, the characteristic dark, crumbly residue of repeated heating, and it belongs to a category of monument found across Ireland in considerable numbers. A second example of the same type lies just 130 metres to the south, which is an unusually close pairing and suggests this particular corner of Cork was a place of sustained activity over time.

A fulacht fia (the plural is fulachtaí fia) is a Bronze Age cooking or processing site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones surrounding a trough that would once have been cut into the ground nearby. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and used to cook meat or process other materials. The proximity of a spring in this case is entirely consistent with the pattern; fulachtaí fia are almost always found near a reliable water source, whether a stream, a bog pool, or a spring. The sheer number of these sites across Ireland, estimated in the tens of thousands, indicates they were a routine feature of Bronze Age life rather than anything exceptional or ceremonial, which makes individual examples easy to overlook in the landscape.