These are clearance cairns, which is exactly what the name suggests, stones gathered and piled out of the way by people trying to make land workable. The act is mundane, almost domestic, yet here on the upland the accumulated labour of that clearance has outlasted almost everything else associated with it.

The cairns sit within an area roughly a hundred metres across in both directions, bounded by low earthen banks that trace the hill summit and run down the north-eastern slopes. Two enclosures lie nearby, one to the north-east and one to the north, forming part of the same field system. Most of the cairns fall between two parallel east-west field boundaries, though several appear above these lines, close to the westernmost enclosure. The peat that now partly covers the ridge has helped preserve the whole arrangement, sealing the banks and cairns against the gradual erosion that would otherwise have softened them into invisibility. Taken together, the field system and its cairns represent the kind of agricultural landscape that was once widespread across Irish uplands during prehistoric or early historic periods, when communities pushed cultivation higher than later generations found practical or necessary.