A cromlech, in the older usage of the term, refers to a megalithic tomb, typically a capstone balanced on upright supports, built thousands of years ago. What stands here, about 95 metres west of Kilmallock's medieval town wall, is more likely a loose cluster of field stones that accumulated a romantic reputation somewhere along the way.

The paper trail begins with P. J. Lynch, writing in 1904, who described the remains of what he called the Kilmallock Cromlech as located behind the Catholic church in the town. He measured the stones carefully: the largest, which he took to be a fallen capstone, ran to 12 feet 6 inches in length, 7 feet 6 inches wide, and nearly 3 feet thick. The upright stone beside it was similarly substantial. All were limestone. By 1984, Aideen Ireland had suggested in her research that Lynch's cromlech and these three stones on the Ash Hill demesne lands were one and the same site, noting that the field they occupy was recorded as the 'Kiln-Field' on an eighteenth-century estate map of Ash Hill, a detail that hints at a more mundane agricultural past than the prehistoric one sometimes imagined for it. The site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's 1840 six-inch map at all, though a later Cassini edition does mark it with the annotation 'Cromlech', suggesting the label arrived with the map rather than with any excavation or formal assessment.

The stones lie in grassland on the demesne of Ash Hill Towers, roughly 700 metres to the north-north-east of the house itself, with Ash Hill Lough, now largely screened by forestry, sitting about 45 metres to the south. Access to the site is not straightforward, as it sits on private land and the surrounding area has changed considerably with afforestation. The stones are visible on satellite imagery as a small, tight cluster, which gives a reasonable sense of their arrangement before visiting. Anyone drawn here by the cromlech label should arrive knowing that the archaeological record treats the identification with scepticism; what survives is a group of large, undeniably striking limestone slabs whose precise origin and purpose remain genuinely unresolved.