They are classified as an anomalous stone group, which is the kind of designation that tells you almost as much by what it rules out as by what it names. These are not a stone circle, not an alignment, not a pair. They do not fit neatly into any of the recognised prehistoric monument types that Cork's landscape supplies in considerable variety, and so they sit, somewhat awkwardly, in their own category.

The five stones are spread across an area of roughly fifty metres by thirty metres, a spacing too generous to suggest a tight ritual arrangement and too deliberate to be easily dismissed as natural scatter. The stones themselves vary noticeably in scale, ranging from just over half a metre to one and a half metres in height, and from less than thirty centimetres to seventy centimetres in thickness. When the archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin recorded the site in 1984, he noted a sixth stone at the south-west side. That stone no longer exists. Its disappearance is unaccounted for in what survives of the record, and its loss means the original configuration, already difficult to interpret, is now permanently incomplete. What those six stones once described in relation to one another, whether a loose ceremonial grouping, a boundary marker, or something else entirely, remains an open question.