Locals once called them the 'leegaun', a designation recorded in 1921 by a researcher named Shaw, who noted the stones but got their precise position wrong, placing them west of a nearby barrow when they actually sit to its east. That kind of small cartographic slip is easy enough to make on a windswept ridge, but it leaves a faint uncertainty trailing behind the site.

The three stones are orthostats, meaning large upright slabs of the kind typically used in megalithic construction, and their arrangement is suggestive. Two are set end to end, longitudinally, as if forming one wall of a chamber; the third is positioned at right angles to them at the north-western end, in the manner of a jamb stone, the upright that frames the entrance to a passage or chamber. Taken together, their configuration points to the partial remains of a megalithic structure, perhaps a tomb or some related monument, that has since been largely levelled, with the survivors absorbed into a later field boundary of earth and stone. Sitting roughly three metres from the external bank of a well-preserved ring-barrow, a circular burial mound enclosed by a bank and sometimes a ditch, the stones occupy a ridge that runs north-east to south-west with open views in every direction, the kind of elevated position that prehistoric builders across Ireland consistently favoured when placing monuments in the landscape.