A gryke is one of the deep natural fissures that split the surface of limestone pavement, and whoever placed these stones used one as a ready-made socket. The three slabs vary considerably in character. The northernmost, at 1.15 metres tall, has a rounded pointed top. The central stone is the tallest at 1.67 metres, highest towards its northern end. The southernmost is the most modest, flat-topped and just 0.6 metres above the ground. Together they read less like a casual arrangement and more like a deliberate sequence.

The question of what they originally were is not fully settled. Coffey, writing in 1990, proposed that these stones were not always a freestanding row but had once formed part of an ancient wall, most of whose material was later robbed out to build a more recent wall nearby. That theory would recast the whole feature as a remnant rather than an intention. Whatever their origin, the stones sit within a dense cluster of prehistoric monuments that was examined by Grant in 1995. Within roughly twenty metres to the south-east lie a wedge tomb, a cist (a small stone-lined burial box, typically prehistoric), and an unclassified megalithic tomb. Another standing stone stands about twenty-one metres to the east. Westropp noted the wider area as far back as 1907. The plateau they occupy is also embedded within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting the landscape here was worked and marked by people across several distinct eras, each leaving their own layer of stone.