Less remarked upon is a specific feature within it: a leacht, or low rectangular stone cairn used in early Irish religious practice as a focus for prayer and commemoration, that carries the traditional name of the Monks' Graveyard. The name itself turns out to be more complicated than it suggests.

Excavation work carried out in 2001 involved the careful removal of a drystone revetment, a facing of stones used to retain and stabilise the cairn's edges, that dated to the nineteenth century or later. What emerged beneath it changed the picture considerably. The Monks' Graveyard was not a single leacht but two conjoined ones, set against each other. This northernmost of the pair had been revetted with stones placed on edge rather than laid flat, a subtle but deliberate constructional choice that distinguishes it from the later work placed over it. The excavation is documented by Bourke in 2003, and a fuller descriptive account appears in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula. The nineteenth-century revetment had, in effect, masked the original character of the structure for well over a century, presenting what looked like a single feature where there had always been two.