The mound measures roughly ten metres along its northwest to southeast axis and eight metres across the other way, rising only about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Its opening, two metres wide, faces east. To a passing eye it might read as a slight rise in boggy terrain, but the horseshoe shape and the blackened, fire-cracked material that forms it are unmistakable signatures of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a Bronze Age cooking or heating site, the interpretation of which has been debated for decades. The standard explanation is that water was boiled in a trough by dropping fire-heated stones into it, the cracked and discarded stones accumulating over repeated use into the characteristic horseshoe mound that surrounds the trough on three sides. They are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, found in their thousands, and they cluster reliably in low-lying, wet ground, which made access to water straightforward. The site at Gooseberryhill follows this pattern precisely, sitting in marshy terrain that would have supplied the water the process required. At some point more recently, a drain was cut across the mound on an east to west axis, bisecting it and leaving the monument in two portions. That kind of interference, usually agricultural in origin, is a familiar complication at low, unenclosed sites that were never marked or fenced off.