What makes it quietly arresting is not its size, which is modest, roughly three metres east to west and half a metre high, but the fact that the Ordnance Survey mapmakers of 1938 simply labelled the spot "Monuments", as though the name alone were sufficient explanation. Resting on top of the structure is a large stone with a shallow hollow worn into its surface, and local tradition held that this stone possessed curative powers.

The structure is a leacht, a term used in Irish archaeology for a low, flat-topped cairn or stone platform, often associated with early Christian devotional practice or commemoration of the dead. It sits approximately 75 metres north-east of a site known as Clochan Leo, a clochan being a drystone corbelled building of the kind found at early monastic settlements along the western seaboard. Inishshark, which was evacuated in 1960 when its last remaining families were relocated to the mainland, had a long tradition of early Christian activity, and the landscape reflects that layered past. The leacht was formally identified during fieldwork in 2008, documented by Kuijt and colleagues in a 2010 publication. Despite heavy overgrowth of vegetation, the structure was recorded as well preserved, with several courses of stonework still intact.

The hollow-surfaced stone lying across the top adds a particular dimension. Stones with natural or worn depressions, sometimes called bullaun stones in the Irish tradition, were frequently associated with healing rituals, the water that collected in the hollow considered to carry restorative or sacred properties. Whether this stone was always part of the leacht or was placed there later is not recorded, but the local belief in its curative powers suggests it had its own significance entirely independent of the masonry beneath it.