To the untrained eye it is unremarkable, a slight rise in a damp field, but it represents one of the most common and still somewhat mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, built around a trough filled with water that was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, having been heated and then quenched repeatedly, eventually split and became useless, and were discarded in a horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough. It is those accumulated mounds of blackened, burnt stone that survive in the landscape today.

The particular example at Gardeen was noted as lying on the southern side of a well, the proximity to water being entirely typical of the type. A researcher named Bowman, writing in 1934, recorded two fulachta fiadh in the Gardeen townland, and this site is thought to be one of that pair. The association with marshy ground and a water source is not incidental. These sites cluster wherever water was reliably available, and the damp, peaty soils of places like this helped preserve the burnt material over thousands of years.