They are fulachtaí fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found across Ireland in enormous numbers, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough, and used to bring the water to a boil, after which meat could be cooked. The repeated heating and quenching shattered the stones, and it is this accumulated debris, rather than any deliberate construction, that forms the mounds we see today.

At Dromteewakeen, the first and larger of the two mounds measures 10.5 metres north to south and 7 metres east to west, composed entirely of those characteristic fire-cracked stones and surviving to an average height of around 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground. It opens to the east, where an oval depression roughly 2.5 by 3.55 metres marks what would have been the trough. Three shallower depressions also occur on the mound's upper surface. The second fulacht fia, just three metres away, is broader and lower, measuring 11.5 metres north to south by 5 metres east to west but reaching only 0.3 metres at its highest point. Both mounds sit in cutaway bog between a modern drain and a small stream that feeds into the Caragh river a short distance to the north. About 30 metres to the west, an uncut bank of peat stands 1.4 metres high, offering a sense of how deeply the surrounding landscape was once covered before the bog was worked.

The proximity of the two sites to one another is worth pausing over. Paired or clustered fulachtaí fia are not unheard of in Ireland, but finding two within a few metres in such a confined valley setting raises questions that remain open. Whether they were used simultaneously, sequentially, or for different purposes is not something the ground surface alone can answer.