A fulacht fia, the term used for a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site, would originally have announced itself as a low horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stones beside a water source. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, remnants of a practice in which stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The example in Gorteen West is, at this point, essentially gone.

Two levelled mounds were identified here in 1959, recorded in the National Museum of Ireland's topographical files. At the time, a Mr Henry Wheeler described one of them as being marked by a considerable amount of burnt stones, situated a few yards from a stream. That stream still runs along the northern edge of the townland boundary with Cloncagh, which would have made this a plausible site for the purpose. The feature does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and aerial and satellite photography taken between 2005 and 2012 shows no surface remains whatsoever. It has been absorbed, effectively, into the surrounding pasture. About 160 metres to the north, a separate feature recorded as a penitential station offers a reminder that this small stretch of countryside accumulated archaeological and religious significance across very different periods.

Because no surface trace is visible, there is little to observe on the ground in any conventional sense. The site sits in private farmland, and visitors would need landowner permission before approaching. What the location does offer, if one is inclined to seek it out, is the particular quality of knowing where something was. The stream that Wheeler noted is still there, still forming the townland boundary. Standing beside it, the absence of the mounds is itself informative, a quiet illustration of how quickly a Bronze Age feature can disappear beneath centuries of agricultural activity.