It is irregular in outline, roughly eighteen metres north to south and sixteen metres east to west, and at a glance it could pass for a natural feature of the landscape. It is not. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, and the burnt material that makes up the mound is the accumulated debris of repeated episodes of stone-boiling, in which rocks were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil.

Fulachta fiadh, the plural form, are among the most frequently recorded prehistoric monuments in the Irish countryside, yet their very ordinariness makes individual examples easy to overlook. The site at Sraharla is part of a cluster of three, which is itself telling. Where one fulacht fia appears, others often follow, suggesting repeated use of a locality over time, perhaps because of reliable access to water or because a particular stretch of boggy ground suited the purpose. The Sraharla mound is composed of the shattered stone and charcoal-stained earth left behind after generations of use, compacted into a form that has survived long enough to be recorded and mapped. Most fulachta fiadh date to the Bronze Age, broadly speaking the period from around 2000 to 500 BC, though some sites in Ireland have yielded earlier or later dates.