What survives is a grass-covered spread of burnt material, the last trace of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet still not fully understood monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape. Fulachtaí fia are prehistoric cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough and a hearth. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and used to cook meat, though brewing, hide-working, and bathing have all been proposed as alternative or additional uses. At Scarteen, even that modest mound is largely gone.

According to local information, the mound was levelled around 1982, leaving behind only the scorched and fragmented spread of material that burning and repeated heating produce over generations of use. The date places the loss within living memory, a reminder that the attrition of prehistoric sites is not always a matter of centuries. Fulachtaí fia are generally assigned to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some examples have earlier or later dates, and the Scarteen site would have been one of many such features once scattered across this part of north Cork.