Yet this cairn at Ballinard is quietly anomalous. Most cairns are circular, the product of stone being piled outward from a central point, often over a burial. This one measures approximately 8.6 metres north to south and 8.7 metres east to west, giving it an unusually rectilinear outline, and it rises to about 1.5 metres, flat-topped rather than domed.

What makes its situation particularly interesting is its proximity to a ringfort, the remains of which lie just 33 metres to the north-west. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and they survive in their thousands across Ireland. The relationship between the cairn and the ringfort is not documented, but the two monuments occupying the same field raises the possibility that this stretch of Cork countryside was in continuous or overlapping use across a long period. Whether the cairn predates the ringfort, was built during the same phase of occupation, or simply happened to share a landscape with it is a question the stones do not answer plainly.