It looks, at first glance, like nothing more than the kind of stony disorder that turns up all over the west of Ireland. Look more carefully, though, and something deliberate begins to emerge: a small arc of set stones, about two metres across, appended to the south-western edge of the mass. Whether this is a cairn, a prehistoric burial or memorial mound of piled stones, or the remains of a simple hut, or some combination of the two, nobody has yet been able to say with certainty. The honest answer recorded for this site is that it may be all three things in sequence, a cairn that was later hollowed out or built upon by someone who needed shelter.

The setting sharpens the ambiguity rather than resolving it. High cliffs fall to the sea roughly 200 metres to the north, and the terrace on which the stones rest opens broadly to the west and south, across coastal commonage that would once have been actively farmed or grazed. The landscape around the knoll is full of related traces. Relict field walls, part of an extensive system of enclosures, run along the western, northern, and eastern slopes, and one wall about 40 metres to the north curves in an irregular, meandering arc some 35 metres long across the eastern slope. A possible hut site lies 45 metres to the north. Taken together, these features suggest a stretch of ground that was used, modified, and reused over a long period, with the stone scatter at Bunnamohaun sitting somewhere in the middle of that layered activity, its original purpose absorbed into later ones. The site was brought to the attention of the National Monuments Service by archaeologist Michael Gibbons.