They typically survive as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of heat-shattered stone and dark, charred soil, the accumulated debris of a cooking method that involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled. The process was repeated until the stones cracked and split, at which point they were discarded to the side, building up the mound over time. The one at Gortaganniv in County Clare is one such site, a quiet mark in the ground whose precise details remain to be fully documented.

Fulachta fia are generally associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some sites have produced dates ranging into the early medieval period. The name itself is an Old Irish term sometimes translated as "cooking place of the deer" or "wild cooking place", though debate continues about whether hunting, feasting, craft activity, or some combination of all three accounts for their use. Clare has a considerable concentration of them, often found near streams or boggy ground where water would have been readily available. Gortaganniv, as a placename, suggests an area of agricultural or pastoral land, the kind of low-lying or marginal terrain where these sites repeatedly appear across Munster and beyond.