Look more carefully, and kerbstones begin to emerge at its base, one to the south, one to the north-west, two more along the northern edge, hinting at a deliberate structure beneath the sod. This is not an isolated feature but one of eight cairns, a cairn being a mound of stones typically raised over a prehistoric burial or used to mark significant ground, arranged in a rough arc across the eastern half of a larger enclosure.

The grouping is what makes Gortlahard quietly arresting. Eight cairns forming a curved line within a single enclosure suggests some form of organised, repeated use of this ground, possibly over a long period, possibly all at once. The individual cairn is modest in scale, roughly four metres across east to west and just half a metre in height, but its neighbours are close. Another of the group lies only seven metres to the north, so that the arc, when read as a whole, begins to feel less like scattered burials and more like a considered arrangement, a landscape decision made by people whose reasoning is now mostly lost to us.