These are boulder burials, a monument type particular to the southwest of Ireland, in which a substantial capstone is raised on two or more supports to create a low, squat chamber. They are less immediately theatrical than a tall portal tomb, but there is something arresting about the sheer weight of the stones involved and the quiet intention behind their arrangement.

At Caherkirky, the two monuments stand roughly five metres apart. The western example is the larger: its cover stone measures approximately 2.4 metres by 2.2 metres and sits a metre thick, resting on three support stones, its upper surface tilting gently downward to the west. The eastern boulder burial is somewhat smaller, with a cover stone of around 1.7 metres by 1.3 metres, and only one of its support stones is clearly visible beneath it. A standing stone lies immediately to the northeast of the eastern monument, suggesting that this corner of the field was once a more formally composed ceremonial or funerary landscape rather than a scattering of unrelated features. The site was recorded by O Nualláin in 1978, and the broader corpus of boulder burials in Cork and Kerry has since been studied in detail, though the precise dating of individual monuments remains difficult. They are generally associated with the Bronze Age, contemporary with the stone rows and stone circles that pepper the same part of Munster.