Two of them are box-like stone enclosures, their sides formed from single large slabs set on edge, with a possible fallen capstone nearby. They look, in other words, like megalithic cists, the kind of stone-lined burial boxes associated with prehistoric interment. But they also sit alongside an Early Christian cross-slab, which points to a very different period of use entirely, and that ambiguity is the thing that makes the site quietly difficult to dismiss.

Scholars have been arguing over these stones since at least 1937, when the possibility of megalithic origin was first raised. By 1981, Thomas Fanning had proposed instead that they were ceallúnach graves, relating to a calluragh burial ground. A calluragh, sometimes spelled cillín, was an informal or unofficial burial place used in early Christian and later medieval Ireland, often for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated ground. The problem is that the stones used here are unusually large for that tradition, and a second possible grave-slab, which might have clarified things, is now missing entirely. The Megalithic Survey of Ireland has formally rejected the structures as megalithic tombs, though this does not necessarily rule out prehistoric origins altogether. The four graves occupy a natural platform roughly 38 metres east to west and just over ten metres north to south, defined on its eastern edge by a stream and on its south by a scarp dropping away some one and a half metres. The whole arrangement sits about three-quarters of a mile south of Lough Anscaul, in ground that gives little away about the sequence of people who left things here.