They are modest things, averaging around three metres by two metres and no more than half a metre high, and they would be easy to dismiss entirely. What makes them worth attention is what they imply: that someone, long before the bog grew over this landscape, was farming here, clearing stones from the ground and piling them out of the way in order to work the soil beneath.

Clearance cairns of this kind are the byproduct of agricultural labour rather than ritual or commemoration. When a field was being prepared for cultivation, loose stones were gathered and heaped at the margins, against boulders, or simply wherever they were least in the way. The result was not a monument but a practical necessity, the ancient equivalent of clearing a yard. At An Choill Mhór, one of the five cairns has been built up against a large boulder, a habit that J. Cuppage, writing in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, notes is still common practice today. The cairns are thought to be associated with a pre-bog field system, meaning the farming activity they represent predates the formation of the blanket peat that now covers them. Exactly when that farming took place is difficult to say with precision, but the presence of a buried field system beneath the bog places this landscape in a long tradition of early agricultural settlement along the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland, where peat growth has preserved, and concealed, considerable evidence of prehistoric land use.