Clearance cairns are exactly what the name suggests, piles of stones gathered from cultivable ground and heaped out of the way, the agricultural equivalent of tidying a room by pushing things under the bed. What makes the cairns on Beginish Island quietly compelling is the density of activity they hint at, clustered as they are within a broader settlement complex that includes eight houses, eight animal shelters, a network of field walls, and, at the island's western end, an iron smelting site.

Beginish lies at the northern end of Valencia Harbour, tucked between Valencia Island and the Kerry mainland. At low tide its south-eastern tip connects by sandbar to the neighbouring Church Island. The high eastern ground of Beginish is called Canroe, and it was here that the archaeologist O'Kelly conducted excavations in the early 1950s, publishing his findings in 1956. Of the fifteen cairns identified on Canroe, fourteen are concentrated on its eastern side, with one positioned nearer the houses to the west. O'Kelly's team fully excavated one well-preserved example, located 55 metres north-east of a structure recorded as House 6. It measured 3.5 metres in diameter and half a metre in height. No finds were recovered from it, which suits the clearance interpretation well enough; these were not burial mounds or ritual deposits but the leavings of ordinary agricultural labour, the stones that got in the way of whoever was farming this exposed Atlantic hillside.