This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by its characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked rock. The principle was straightforward: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough until the contents boiled. The mound itself is the accumulated debris of that process, discarded burnt stone built up over repeated use, sometimes across many generations.

The Urraghilmore site measures roughly fourteen metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around ten metres across, with burnt material still visible eroding into a drain to the west. What makes this particular example more than a patch of discoloured ground is what came to light in 1989, when levelling of the mound uncovered a wooden trough. A single oak timber was retrieved, measuring one point nine five metres in length, sixty centimetres wide, and fifty centimetres thick. Troughs like this are the functional heart of a fulacht fia, the vessel into which the heated stones were plunged, and finding one intact or even partially preserved is relatively uncommon. Oak, dense and slow to decay when kept waterlogged in boggy ground, has allowed a small number of such timbers to survive from the Bronze Age into the present.

The site sits in ground that was formerly boggy, a setting entirely typical of fulachtaí fia, which tend to cluster near reliable water sources and low-lying wet areas. The burnt spread is the most visible indicator remaining, and the retrieved timber is likely held separately rather than on site. Anyone passing through the area would find little to see above ground beyond the general topography of what was once a working wetland margin, now long since drained and turned to pasture.