It is precisely this kind of waterlogged, marginal land that tends to preserve a fulacht fia, a low mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone left behind by prehistoric cooking activity. The site at Gortlecka sits in damp rough grazing near the lough's western shore, a moss-covered subcircular mound measuring roughly eight metres east to west and six and a half metres north to south, rising no more than forty-five centimetres above the surrounding ground. Three whitethorn trees have taken root on it, as they so often do on old earthworks, their thorny canopy marking the spot against the flat, wet pasture around it.

A fulacht fia, in simple terms, is the accumulated debris of a process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, most likely for cooking. The mound itself is the discard heap, built up over repeated use. What makes the Gortlecka example particularly interesting is not the mound itself but its company. It is the northernmost of four such monuments clustered in the same area, with a second site approximately sixty-five metres to the south-south-east, a third around one hundred and thirty-five metres in the same direction, and a fourth roughly one hundred and ninety-five metres to the south. The spacing is notably regular, the four monuments averaging sixty-five to seventy metres apart, which gives the cluster a deliberate, almost organised character that a single isolated site would not suggest.