What makes it odd is the combination of forms it presents: a linear cairn, essentially a low elongated mound of stones, sits within what appears to be a sub-circular setting of eight stones, most of them now grass-covered and barely distinguishable from the surrounding turf. The whole thing occupies a slight natural hollow, which gives it a quietly enclosed quality, as though the landscape has gently cupped it.

The site was recorded by archaeologists Quinn and Carroll in 2010, during an assessment carried out ahead of a proposed wind farm in the area. Their description is careful and notably hedged. The outer arrangement is described as a "possible" sub-circular setting, which is the kind of qualified language that signals genuine uncertainty about whether what is visible is a deliberate prehistoric structure or simply a scatter of fieldstones that happens to suggest a pattern. The cairn itself measures 2.1 metres east to west and one metre north to south, dimensions modest enough that it could be overlooked entirely without the trained eye that flagged it. Whether it relates to burial, boundary-marking, or some other practice is not established. The word "anomalous" in its designation is not incidental; it reflects the difficulty of fitting this particular cluster of stones into any tidy category of monument type.

Sites like this are more common in the Irish countryside than most people realise. Fieldstone can accumulate through agricultural clearance, through the collapse of older structures, or through deliberate prehistoric activity, and the line between these origins is not always recoverable. What survives at Dooneens is ambiguous enough to remain an open question, sitting unremarked in its hollow while the grass slowly covers whatever arrangement was once more legible.