They are not monuments in any ceremonial sense, nor the ruins of buildings. They are, most likely, the discarded byproduct of farming, the accumulated debris of people clearing a field, stone by stone, so that something useful could be grown or grazed in its place.

Recorded and described by Cuppage in 1986, the five cairns are broadly similar in scale, each roughly three metres by two metres and between thirty-five and fifty centimetres high on average. That peat now overlies them suggests the land was once open and workable, part of what archaeologists call a pre-bog field system, an organised agricultural landscape that predates the formation of the blanket bog which eventually swallowed it. Field clearance cairns are exactly what the name implies: the stones pulled from the soil during cultivation, gathered and heaped at the field edge or against a convenient boulder to keep them out of the way. One of the An Choill Mhór cairns was piled against just such a large boulder, a practical solution that Cuppage notes remains common farming practice to this day, connecting these ancient heaps to a continuous thread of agricultural habit.

What makes this group quietly significant is less any individual cairn than the pattern they form together. Five of them, distributed across a landscape now largely featureless bog, are the faint residue of a working countryside that has otherwise vanished. The bog preserved them by burying them, which is also why they are so easy to overlook.