Cairns, in the Irish archaeological sense, are deliberate accumulations of stone, typically raised over burials or as landscape markers, and finding them grouped like this, curving through the eastern half of one enclosure at Gortlahard in County Kerry, suggests a deliberate, organised use of the space rather than anything accidental or incremental.

This particular cairn is circular, roughly four metres across and just under a metre high, and most of its surface is now grassed over, the original stonework buried beneath centuries of sod. Only at its north-eastern base do stones of various sizes break through the turf. It sits about twenty-seven metres from the enclosing wall of the larger enclosure to the south-east, and its nearest neighbour in the arc lies fourteen metres to the north-west. The grouping as a whole numbers eight cairns in total, all contained within that same enclosure, which is itself a scheduled site. The relationship between the cairns and the enclosure wall, and what the arc formation might originally have signified, remains the kind of question the landscape holds without answering.