The label is almost certainly wrong. Before the lake's water level was artificially lowered in the nineteenth century, these stones would have been submerged entirely, sitting out in the open water of Lough Gur rather than on its bank. That single fact reframes everything about them. What was once read as ceremonial prehistory may be something altogether more prosaic, or may be nothing archaeological at all.

The earliest detailed description comes from 1833, when a writer identified as Croker counted the stones carefully: the largest of the three circles measured twenty yards in diameter and held fifteen stones, a second ran to thirteen yards with eight stones visible, and the smallest measured eight yards across with seven. Croker also noted two parallel lines of stones extending from the second circle toward the water, and a serpentine passage of parallel stones running between the third circle and the nearby ruined New Church, trailing off toward a low boggy tract called the Red Bog. By 1912, the antiquarian Windle had reached a sceptical conclusion. He argued that the ground on which the stones stand must have been underwater when the adjacent Black Castle was built, since the castle's defensive arrangements would otherwise make no sense. A local resident had told him he had seen the lake water rise as high as the wall separating the stones from the road, and had fished directly over the spot. Windle judged them natural formations. That view is supported by a parallel case at another Lough Gur site known as the Spectacles, where similar stone settings excavated by Ó Ríordáin in 1949 proved to be entirely natural, with no archaeological significance whatsoever. The current interpretation, registered as National Monument No. 247, hedges carefully: the stones probably represent the remains of a crannog cairn or settlement platform, a crannog being an artificial or modified island used for habitation, but the possibility that they are purely geological remains open.

The stones are visible along the south-eastern shoreline of Lough Gur, near the ruined New Church. The site is most legible when lake levels are low, which tends to be in drier summer months, as higher water can still encroach on the ground around the stones much as Windle's neighbour described. Two of the three settings are shown as conjoined on the old OS map, with the third standing roughly twenty-five metres to the north-east. They are easy to overlook precisely because they do not announce themselves as monuments, and that ambiguity is rather the point.