The circle measures 8.5 metres in diameter, and its stones, known as orthostats, range from just over a metre to just over two metres in height. What makes the arrangement particularly legible is its entrance: two radially set stones at the north-north-east mark a deliberate threshold into the space, though the most easterly of the pair has tilted westward over the centuries. The circle was probably never meant to have only nine stones. Researchers believe two are missing, the axial stone and one other, which would have brought the original count to eleven.

Kerry's Iveragh and Beara peninsulas contain a notable concentration of multiple-stone circles, a monument type associated broadly with the Bronze Age, when communities across Atlantic Europe were raising standing stones in circular arrangements whose precise purposes remain debated. The scholar Seán Ó Nualláin catalogued this particular circle in 1984, assigning it number 48 in his survey of the type. The axial stone, the low flat stone typically placed opposite the entrance and considered significant to the circle's orientation, is one of the defining features of the southwest Irish tradition, which makes its absence here especially noticeable. Running roughly a metre to the north of the circle, a relict field boundary survives in the landscape, a fossilised remnant of a much later agricultural system that grew up around, and indifferently past, the prehistoric monument.