The mound measured roughly sixteen metres by eight, modest in scale but typical of its kind, and the blackened, fire-cracked material beneath the turf was the accumulated debris of what archaeologists call a fulacht fia, an outdoor cooking place of prehistoric Ireland. The term, sometimes rendered as fulacht fiadh, translates loosely as "cooking pit of the deer" and describes a recurring feature of the Irish landscape: a horseshoe-shaped or oval mound of burnt stone and charcoal built up beside a water source over repeated use, usually interpreted as a site where water was boiled by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough.

The site at Shanbally was recorded as early as 1934 by Bowman, at which point it presumably still sat intact in its pasture, a grass-covered swell in the ground that a careful eye might have noticed but most walkers would have passed without a second thought. The adjacent well, which would have been central to the site's original function as a reliable water source, has since dried up or been drained. By the time any formal inventory caught up with the site, the local community already knew it had been flattened, the mound dispersed sometime around 1984. What the ground holds now is the remnant scatter of that destruction, archaeological material reduced from a coherent monument to a disturbance in the soil.