They are not evenly spaced, not neatly aligned, and they do not form the kind of tidy circle that appears on heritage signage. What they seem to be doing, according to archaeologists who have recorded the site, is delimiting a cairn rather than defining one outright. A cairn, in this context, is simply a mound of stones used to mark a burial or a place of significance; the distinction here is subtle but telling. The boulders feel less like a formal monument and more like a boundary drawn around something that was already there.

The two most prominent stones stand almost directly opposite each other. To the west, a triangular-shaped granite boulder rises to about one and a half metres, narrow and upright in character. Facing it, a large recumbent conglomerate, meaning a stone that lies roughly horizontal, measures over a metre in height and more than a metre across. The pairing gives the site an informal axis, though whether this was intentional on the part of its builders remains unknown. A note from 1925, recorded by a researcher identified as Mc Dix, mentions an inner circle of stones with a diameter of approximately 2.7 metres, but when the site was inspected and compiled by archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, no such inner ring was apparent. It had either been removed, obscured, or possibly misread in the earlier account.

The site sits on a rise on the north-eastern side of Tallaght Hill, which places it above the suburban sprawl of south-west Dublin but within relatively easy reach of the city. The plateau setting means the stones are visible against the skyline as you approach from below, which may or may not have been part of the original intention. Because the boulders are irregularly placed and vary considerably in size and shape, it takes a moment to read the site as a circle at all; walking the perimeter slowly is more useful than trying to take it in from a single vantage point. The mix of granite and conglomerate in the same structure is itself worth noting, as conglomerate, a sedimentary rock made up of rounded fragments cemented together, is less commonly seen in prehistoric stone circles than the harder granites of the Dublin and Wicklow uplands.