They are boulder burials, a type of monument found almost exclusively in the south-west of Ireland, in which a substantial flat-bottomed boulder is raised on smaller support stones to cover a burial beneath. The form is deceptively simple, and easy to walk past without realising you are looking at something deliberately constructed in the Bronze Age.

The two monuments at Crumpane sit just 1.1 metres apart on a north-east-facing slope. The larger of the pair has a cover stone measuring roughly two metres by 1.4 metres and standing about 0.7 metres thick, resting on two support stones. The second, positioned to the north-west, is a sub-rectangular boulder somewhat smaller, at approximately 1.5 metres by 1.3 metres and 0.5 metres thick, raised on three support stones. The pairing is notable. Boulder burials are not uncommon in west Cork taken individually, but to have two sitting in such close proximity on the same slope gives the site a particular quiet weight. Whether the burials were contemporary, or whether one followed the other across some span of generations, is not recorded.

The setting matters too. The north-east-facing slope above the Kealincha river valley is the kind of terrain that tends to preserve these monuments simply because it was never worth breaking up for tillage. The rough grazing that surrounds the stones today has likely been their accidental guardian for centuries.