They are not burial monuments in the usual sense; the working assumption is that they are clearance cairns, the accumulated result of farmers gathering loose stones from fields to make the ground more workable. It is one of those archaeological features that tells you less about ceremony or commemoration than about the sheer labour of making a small island liveable.

Beginish sits between Valentia Island and the Kerry mainland, its eastern end connected to the neighbouring Church Island by a sandbar that appears only at certain low tides. The settlement complex at Canroe is substantial for such a modest piece of land: eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, two poorly built ancillary structures, and an extensive network of fields and walls, with an iron smelting site at the island's western end. The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly investigated the complex in the early 1950s, fully excavating two houses, one cairn, and an animal shelter. The excavated cairn, located roughly 55 metres north-east of one of the houses, was a modest affair, measuring 3.5 metres in diameter and half a metre high. No finds were recovered from it, which is consistent with the clearance interpretation; there was simply nothing to find, because nothing had been deliberately deposited. Fourteen of the fifteen cairns lie on the eastern side of Canroe, with one positioned closer to the houses on the west, a distribution that may reflect the particular stone density of the eastern fields rather than any symbolic arrangement.