This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and ash that accumulated over repeated use. Water would have been heated by dropping stones from a fire into a trough, and the discarded, shattered stones built up over time into the mound that survives today. What makes the Glashaboy example quietly notable is its scale and its company: the mound measures roughly 15 metres in length, 12 metres in width, and stands about 1.3 metres high, and another fulacht fia lies just 3 metres to its north-east.

The proximity of two such sites to one another is not entirely unusual in Ireland, where fulachtaí fia sometimes cluster in low-lying or waterside areas, but the pairing here, within a few paces of each other, raises questions about whether they were in use simultaneously or represent successive episodes of activity across a longer span of time. The site also sits approximately 15 metres east of a separate rectangular enclosure, suggesting this corner of North Cork was a place of some sustained human presence in prehistory. The details were first formally recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 4, published in 2000, drawing on fieldwork across the northern part of the county.