The label "Druid's Altar" was applied liberally across Ireland during a period when antiquarians, and later the general public, attributed almost any prehistoric stone arrangement to the druids, that conveniently mysterious priestly caste of the Iron Age Celts. In practice, the kinds of monuments that received this name, typically portal tombs or exposed capstones of collapsed passage tombs, pre-date the druids by thousands of years, belonging instead to Neolithic or Early Bronze Age communities whose religious practices we can only infer from the monuments themselves.

Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, consist of two or more upright stones supporting a large flat capstone, the whole structure originally buried within a long earthen or stone mound that has since eroded away. What visitors see today is effectively the skeleton of a much larger construction. The Seefin example carries this same lineage, its popular name obscuring a far older and less legible past. The townland of Seefin, whose name derives from the Irish "Suí Finn", meaning the seat or dwelling of Fionn, gestures at the way mythological figures were later grafted onto landscapes already ancient when those stories were being told.

Because detailed records for this particular monument have not yet been made publicly available, the finer points of its dimensions, condition, and precise classification remain difficult to pin down from a distance. What can be said is that Galway's upland areas contain several such monuments, often situated on elevated ground with wide views across bog and field, positions that may reflect something about how Neolithic communities understood and marked their landscape.