It measures roughly seven metres long and seven metres wide, rising just over half a metre from the surrounding pasture, with an opening about two metres across facing east-south-east. The opening may have been made slightly deeper over time by the removal of burnt material, whether by farmers clearing the ground or by earlier disturbance. It looks, at first glance, like little more than an overgrown earthwork.

What it actually represents is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland. The basic principle involves heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a trough of water to bring it rapidly to the boil. The burnt, shattered stones were raked out and discarded, and over generations of repeated use they accumulated into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound that survives today. These sites date most commonly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some are earlier or later. What makes Templemary particularly worth noting is that it does not stand alone. A second fulacht fia lies approximately 120 metres to the south-east, suggesting this stretch of north Cork was visited, or perhaps seasonally occupied, repeatedly over a long period. Whether the two sites were used simultaneously or represent separate episodes of activity at different points in prehistory is the kind of question the mounds themselves cannot easily answer.