It is U-shaped, open to the west, roughly nineteen metres along its longer axis, and rises only about thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground. That modest profile conceals something far older and stranger: this is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, allowing large quantities of meat to be cooked. The troughs are often timber-lined, and the characteristic horseshoe or U-shaped mound that accumulates around them is made up of the cracked, fire-shattered stones discarded after repeated use.

What gives this particular example a quietly satisfying detail is its relationship to the landscape around it. Just to the north-west of the mound there is an overgrown rock outcrop, and on the western side of that outcrop a spring emerges. The proximity of a reliable water source is exactly what a fulacht fia requires, and here the connection between monument and topography is unusually legible. The site sits in a valley running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, and it was noted by the cartographer Tim Robinson, who included it on his celebrated map of the Burren published in 1977. Robinson's maps of the western seaboard, produced with painstaking fieldwork and a fine eye for the layered human presence in the landscape, remain a landmark in Irish cartography, and an appearance on one of them is its own form of distinction for a small earthwork that might otherwise go unrecorded by anyone but specialists.