A barely discernible semicircular mound, roughly three metres wide, sits low in a field that has been gradually brought into reclamation. It would be easy to walk straight past it, and almost everyone does. What the mound represents, however, is something far older and stranger than its modest profile suggests: a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically beside water sources or in boggy ground. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, leaving behind a characteristic horseshoe or kidney-shaped mound of cracked, fire-blackened stone and charcoal.

A cutting made through the mound exposed burnt material running for seven metres in section, at a depth of around thirty centimetres, giving some sense of how much activity once took place at this otherwise unremarkable spot. A deep drain dug about five metres to the west also revealed burnt material, suggesting the site may extend further than the visible surface mound implies. What makes the Gowlane example particularly notable in its local context is its proximity to a second fulacht fia immediately to the north, the two sites sitting close together in the same wet, low-lying ground. Paired or clustered fulachtaí fia are not unheard of in Ireland, and their grouping may reflect repeated use of a favoured location across generations, though the precise relationship between the two here is not recorded.