It measures roughly four metres in length and just thirty centimetres in height, easy to walk past without a second glance. What makes it quietly interesting is precisely that ambiguity: it may be nothing more than a farmer's clearance heap, stones gathered from a field to make the land workable. Or it may be something considerably older.

When archaeologists Quinn and Carroll assessed the site in 2010 as part of a heritage evaluation for a proposed wind farm at Doonens, they noted the cairn's position in cut-away bog, that is, bog that has already been harvested for peat, exposing or revealing what lies beneath. A clearance cairn is typically a rough pile of field stones removed to improve ground for cultivation or grazing, a practical feature found across Irish farmland in various periods. But because this one sits within bog that has since been cut away, there is a reasonable possibility that the stones predate the bog formation itself, meaning they could have been deposited in a landscape that was still open ground before the peat accumulated over centuries. That possibility shifts the feature from agricultural tidying into something potentially prehistoric, a small monument or land-clearance remnant from a time when this part of Cork looked nothing like it does today. The cairn is oval in plan, oriented east to west, and sits just south of a recorded field wall.