Each is a roughly circular pile of large and medium-sized stones and slabs, plain and functional in appearance, some with a single upright slab set into the top. They sit quietly in the landscape, neither monumental nor decorative, more like waymarks accumulated over a long period than any formal funerary monument.

Local oral tradition holds that these cairns mark a funerary route, the path taken by communities on the south-western side of Achill Island when bringing their dead to Cill Damhnait, the church and burial ground on the eastern side of the island. Wayside cairns of this type, sometimes called cairns of passage, were built up incrementally, each mourner adding a stone as the cortège passed. The practice is found across Ireland and Scotland, particularly along routes connecting remote communities to their parish burial grounds, and it left behind these quiet accumulations of stone that can be easily mistaken for field clearance or natural scattering. Here, the setting reinforces their purpose: the pass is a threshold between one side of the island and the other, and at the eastern end of the complex, the view opens over Achill Sound toward the unmistakable cone of Croagh Patrick on the distant Mayo mainland.

The cairns are set in rough, boggy terrain on an exposed mountain pass, so the ground underfoot is uneven and the weather on Achill can shift quickly. The clusters are spread along the pass rather than concentrated at a single point, so it is worth moving slowly through the area rather than stopping at the first stones encountered.