At around five metres high, built in coursed ashlar, and topped with a cornice, they were substantial things, the kind of architecture that expects to be approached by carriage. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map named them the "White Piers" and shows two long avenues, set some six hundred metres apart, radiating outward from Rockfield House to the south-east, with these outer piers marking the furthest reach of the estate's formal approach.

Rockfield House itself, positioned about seven hundred metres to the south-east of the piers, is a two-storey structure with a three-bay entrance front and a hipped roof, rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century. Its associated farm buildings are said to have incorporated stone taken from nearby Ballyheen Castle, suggesting a certain pragmatic recycling of the local landscape. The OS Field Books of 1840 record the piers as the intended outer gateway to the house, and a gate lodge once stood at the end of the still-used western avenue, though nothing of it survives. Around the piers themselves, local tradition collected competing explanations. One, recorded by the antiquarian J. Grove White in his early twentieth-century survey of Cork, held that the piers were erected by the English to mark their victory at the Battle of Knocknanuss, fought nearby in 1647, a decisive and brutal engagement in which a Confederate Irish and Scottish force was defeated by Parliamentarian troops under Lord Inchiquin. Another tradition, also noted by Grove White, attributed the piers to a different function entirely, suggesting they had served as the entrance to the Fair Green of Ballyheen. Whether either account has any foundation is impossible to say now.

The piers were removed around 1997 as part of a conservation programme carried out by Cork County Council. One detail survived long enough to be recorded: the ball finial atop the western pier was still in place at the time of survey, a small, round persistence above all the uncertainty about what exactly these structures were built to commemorate.