That emptiness is the point. Unlike a burial cairn, where stones are heaped over a central deposit, a ring-cairn is defined by its hollow core, a roughly circular bank of stone surrounding a space that may once have been used for ritual activity, cremation deposits, or ceremonies whose exact nature remains unclear to archaeologists.

This particular example is modest in scale but precise in its geometry. The stone ring measures 7.7 metres north to south and 7.2 metres east to west, stands around 0.4 metres high, and is approximately 3 metres wide, built in what is described as dump construction, meaning the stones were piled rather than carefully coursed or arranged. The central area it encloses is flat. It sits roughly 11 metres to the south-east of a neighbouring cairn, suggesting this part of the hillside at Daingean Na Saileach was a place of some deliberate significance during prehistory, with monuments positioned in relation to one another rather than scattered at random across the landscape. Ring-cairns of this type are generally associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, though precise dating for individual examples is rarely available without excavation.