The Ordnance Survey marked them simply as "Memorial Stones" on the six-inch sheet for the area, which is itself a kind of cartographic shrug, a label applied when the surveyor knew something was there but could not say exactly what.

When the archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valéra and Seán Ó Nualláin examined the group in 1964, they measured and described each stone with care. Three of them stand upright: the first, incorporated into a field fence, measures roughly 90 centimetres by 80 centimetres at its base and rises to 1.6 metres; the second stands about 3 metres to the north-east and reaches 1.3 metres in height; the third, positioned 4.2 metres south of the second and 2.4 metres from the first, is the tallest at 1.7 metres. A fourth stone lies flat to the east of the others, much smaller and only about 20 centimetres above the ground, and the researchers noted it may have collapsed from an original upright position. The spatial relationship between the three standing stones does not conform to the known layouts of megalithic tombs, the large prehistoric burial structures built from massive slabs that are found across Ireland. De Valéra and Ó Nualláin concluded that the monument's nature was doubtful and that it could not, on the evidence available to them, be accepted as a megalithic tomb. That measured scepticism has left the site in an awkward category: genuinely ancient in appearance, probably deliberate in arrangement, but without a firm identity.