Only about six metres of its southern slope breaks free of the vegetation, rising roughly 0.7 metres above the surrounding ground. What it exposes is diagnostic enough: a dense accumulation of heat-shattered limestone fragments packed into dark grey soil, the unmistakable signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia (the plural is fulachtaí fia) is a type of prehistoric burnt mound, found in enormous numbers across Ireland, most commonly dating from the Bronze Age. The working principle involved heating stones in a fire until they were intensely hot, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, most likely for cooking. The cracked, fire-fractured stones were then discarded in a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough. At Knockanes, a narrow gully running just one metre to the south of the mound was probably the original watercourse that fed the operation, and a modern concrete water tank positioned roughly ten metres to the east may well be drawing on the same underground spring source that made the location attractive in the first place. The karstic limestone landscape of the Burren, riddled with fissures and underground drainage, makes precise water sources both reliable and, to the modern eye, surprisingly easy to miss. Tom Coffey noted a cluster of fulachtaí fia in this area on annotated maps in 1994, and the site was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. It is not an isolated feature: a second fulacht fia sits just fifteen metres to the east on the same limestone terrace, and two further examples lie roughly 200 and 250 metres to the southwest on a lower terrace below.

The blackthorn that now engulfs the mound makes it impossible to establish its full dimensions, which is a common frustration with fulachtaí fia in heavily vegetated ground. Visitors to this part of the Burren National Park are unlikely to stumble across it without prior knowledge of its location, and even then would find most of the monument hidden. The visible southern edge, modest as it is, still carries that particular quality of the Burren: ancient evidence sitting quietly in a landscape that makes no effort to announce itself.