The term, sometimes translated loosely as "wild deer cooking place", refers to the horseshoe-shaped mounds of burnt and shattered stone that mark the sites of ancient hearths, typically Bronze Age in date, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The stones, unable to withstand repeated thermal shock, eventually crumbled and were discarded into the distinctive mound that survives today. The one at Kilbreckan, in County Clare, is a quiet example of this widespread phenomenon, sitting in a county already well furnished with prehistoric remains.

The precise details of this particular site remain sparse at present, but its location in County Clare places it within a landscape that was clearly active during the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, the period to which most fulachtaí fia are assigned. Clare has a notable concentration of prehistoric monuments, from the limestone terraces of the Burren with their wedge tombs and ring forts, to the river valleys and boglands where fulachtaí fia tend to cluster. These sites are almost always found near water, since a reliable source was essential to the process, whether that purpose was cooking, hide processing, textile work, or something else entirely. Scholars continue to debate the exact function, and it is likely that different sites served different needs at different times.