They were grand enough to have earned their own name on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where they appear simply as the "White Piers". What made them quietly odd was the question of what, exactly, they were for. The gap between them was far too wide to have held a conventional gate, and the house they supposedly served, Rockfield House, sat some seven hundred metres away to the south-east, connected by two radiating avenues each running about six hundred metres in length.

The OS Field Books of 1840 recorded them as the intended outer piers of the entrance to Rockfield House, a two-storey, three-bay structure with a hipped roof that was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century. The avenue arrangement, splaying outward from the house like a pair of arms, was an ambitious piece of designed landscape. A gate lodge once stood at the end of the western-north-western avenue, though it was already gone by the time anyone thought to record its absence. The farm buildings associated with Rockfield were said locally to have incorporated stone from Ballyheen Castle, suggesting a long habit of recycling the landscape's older material. But the piers attracted stranger traditions too. The antiquarian James Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, recorded a local belief that they had been erected by the English to mark their victory at the Battle of Knocknanuss, fought in 1647, one of the most decisive Parliamentarian victories in Munster during the Confederate Wars. A correspondent identified only as Mananaan Mac Lir offered Grove White an entirely different theory: that the piers had originally marked the entrance to the Fair Green of Ballyheen, a gathering place rather than a private demesne.

None of those stories can now be verified on the ground. The piers were removed around 1997 as part of a conservation programme by Cork County Council, leaving the competing explanations, the vanished lodge, and the partially surviving avenues as the main evidence that something rather elaborate was once arranged across this stretch of north Cork farmland.