The problem is that nobody could find them, and when a researcher eventually did, the stones turned out to be almost certainly natural.

The site first entered the record through a drawing made by Somerville of University College Cork, which depicted what looked like a deliberate arrangement of three stones. It was logged with a specific map reference in the 1988 Sites and Monuments Record, but that location proved to be wrong. For years the stones remained unvisited and unverified in the field. When Connie Murphy eventually tracked down the actual site, the conclusion was quietly deflating: the formation is most likely the work of geology rather than people. The coordinates and the monument record were both amended accordingly, and the site was reclassified under the careful heading of "anomalous stone group", a designation that manages to say both "we found it" and "we are not sure what it is" at the same time.

What lingers is the gap between the drawing and the ground. Somerville's sketch was persuasive enough to get the stones into an archaeological inventory, and for decades the Slieve Miskish hillside effectively contained a phantom monument, mapped but unfound, assumed prehistoric until someone climbed to it and looked more carefully. It is a small illustration of how landscape features, particularly on remote upland terrain, can accumulate official significance before anyone has confirmed they deserve it.