The answer may lie partly in the landscape itself. Set into wet peatland on a gentle westward-facing slope above the Atlantic, the monument sits in the kind of terrain that swallows things gradually, and four of its stones are now low and largely peat-covered, effectively returning to the bog that surrounds them.

When a field inspection was carried out in 1997, what had been mapped as a simple circle of boulders around twenty-five metres in diameter revealed itself to be something more irregular. The enclosed area is subtriangular rather than truly circular, measuring roughly 32 metres on its longer axis and just under 24 metres on the shorter, and the thirty stones that define it behave quite differently from one another. Seven stand fully upright, six are set on their edges, and fifteen are irregularly shaped boulders placed with no obvious consistency. The uneven ground inside the enclosure adds to the sense that this is not a monument that conforms tidily to the familiar image of a prehistoric stone circle. Whether it belongs to the same broad tradition of Bronze Age ceremonial enclosures found elsewhere in the west of Ireland, or represents something less easily categorised, is not straightforwardly answered by its appearance on the ground.