Carrigaphooca translates from the Irish as 'stone of the púca', the púca being a shape-shifting spirit from Irish folklore, and that association clings to the small group of standing stones that occupy a flat stretch of pasture in mid-Cork, roughly 300 metres from where the Foherish and Sullane rivers meet. Only three stones remain upright today, arranged within what was once a circle of at least 5.5 metres in diameter, with a further fallen stone or two lying nearby. The tallest, standing to the south, reaches 2.2 metres and faces its shorter counterpart to the north across the interior of the circle; a third upright stands to the east, oriented east to west rather than sharing the SSE-NNW axis of the other two. The asymmetry is part of what makes the place quietly compelling, the surviving stones presenting just enough geometry to suggest an original design without fully revealing it.

How many stones once completed the perimeter is genuinely uncertain. Writing in the eighteenth century, Charles Smith described what he saw in 1750 as 'the remains of a druid altar, encompassed with a circle of stones, pitched endways', a phrase that captures the upright, slab-like quality of the orthostats, stones set on their ends rather than laid flat. Later observers Windele and Conlon counted five stones, four still standing and one prostrate. The archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin, working from the physical evidence in the early 1980s, proposed that the circle may originally have comprised seven orthostats together with an internal quartz stone, quartz being a material that appears repeatedly in the ritual landscapes of prehistoric Ireland, possibly for its reflective or symbolic properties. The proximity of a medieval tower house, the Carrigaphooca castle, sitting roughly 250 metres to the south-west, adds a different layer to the landscape; the same rocky prominence that gave the site its uncanny name apparently continued to attract settlement and fortification across the millennia.