They are not burial monuments or ritual features in any obvious sense; the most likely explanation is far more mundane. People cleared their fields, piled the stones somewhere out of the way, and moved on. The result, centuries later, is a scatter of low cairns that records the shape of agricultural labour rather than death or ceremony.

Beginish sits between Valentia Island and the mainland, close enough to Church Island that at certain low tides a connecting sand-bar links the two. The high eastern end of Beginish, Canroe, holds a settlement complex of considerable density: eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, two poorly built structures, and an extensive network of fields and walls. An iron smelting site lies at the island's western end. The whole complex was investigated by O'Kelly in the early 1950s, and the published excavation report from 1956 remains the principal account of the site. Fourteen of the fifteen cairns cluster on the eastern side of Canroe; one sits closer to the houses on the west. A single well-preserved cairn, located 55 metres north-east of one of the excavated houses, was fully dug out. It measured 3.5 metres across and half a metre high. Nothing was found inside it. A clearance cairn, that is, a mound formed simply by gathering surface stones to free ground for cultivation or grazing, would typically yield nothing, and this one kept to type. The absence of finds is itself informative: it suggests a working landscape, not a commemorative one.