Known as the Coumanare arrows, they are short pieces of wood, between roughly fifteen and seventeen centimetres long and up to two centimetres thick, pointed at one or both ends. They emerge from the peat as it erodes, either still embedded in the bog or lying loose on the exposed stony surface between the banks. Hundreds have been documented as removed from the site, recorded by Hitchcock as early as 1850 and again by Tempest in 1938, and many more were almost certainly taken away without any record at all.

When students from the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork surveyed the site in 1970, the erosion had done some of the excavation work for them, cutting natural horizontal sections through the peat banks and revealing the sticks in position. They appeared in clusters as often as individually, with no consistent orientation; some stood vertically, others leaned at angles, others lay flat. The peat banks here reach up to two metres deep, and one stick was found protruding from a vertical face at a depth of sixty-one centimetres from the base. Alongside the arrows, the UCC team recovered small wood slivers that looked like the by-product of sharpening, as well as a flint flake and a large oak peg, pointed at one end and pierced with a hole at the other. Pollen analysis, published by Mitchell in 1951, placed at least one of the sticks in a layer of peat that formed at the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Age in Ireland, suggesting considerable antiquity.

Local tradition offers a vivid explanation: the sticks are the arrows fired in a great battle between the champions of Ulster and Munster, and Com an Áir, the Irish name for the townland, is usually translated as the Hollow of the Slaughter. It is a satisfying story, but archaeologists have generally set it aside in favour of a more functional theory, that the pointed sticks were driven into the ground as a deer trap of some kind. Neither explanation accounts neatly for all the physical evidence, and the site remains genuinely unresolved. The bog continues to erode, and the stony mountain surface between the peat banks is still giving up objects that have been buried, by some estimates, for three thousand years.