Each boulder stands around one and a half metres tall. From the roads below, near Eadestown and Spinans Bridge, they read as a bright cluster of white against the hill, visible from a considerable distance. Whether the arrangement is purely geological or whether it accumulated meaning over centuries of human occupation in the surrounding landscape is a question that has never been fully resolved. Locally they are known simply as the White Stones, though older names suggest they were understood as something more than an outcrop.

In 1947 the antiquarian Liam Price visited the site on foot, approaching via the old roadway to Kilranelagh graveyard. He noted the quartz emerging at around a hundred feet above the thousand-foot contour, loose blocks lying close together, and remarked that he knew of no other hill in Ireland with a comparable group. A reference recorded in 1930 gives the stones an earlier local name, the Griddle Stones, with the accompanying claim that kings were buried there, though that tradition may be entangled with a nearby stone circle at Boleycarrigeen. The hill carries further ancient company: a ruined cairn sits roughly two hundred and twenty metres to the south, and a hillfort lies about three hundred and fifty metres to the south-south-east, with Kilranelagh church and graveyard a short distance to the west. The stones sit, in other words, inside a landscape that was densely significant across several periods. Researcher Michael Russell has proposed that the White Stones are the same feature referred to in the early Middle Irish saga Fingal Rónáin, a tale from the historical cycle concerning Rónán mac Aeda, King of Leinster, and the killing of his son Máel-Fhothartaig. In one passage, a character directs others to hunt at the Cows of Aife, with a gloss explaining that the Cows of Aife are stones on the side of a mountain that resemble white cows when seen from a distance. The description fits the White Stones with a precision that is difficult to dismiss, even if the identification cannot be proven.