The cairn at Gurteen is none of those things. Roughly circular, measuring about three metres east to west and two and a half metres north to south, and rising only around forty centimetres above the ground, it sits on a grassy knoll on a south-east facing slope above the Glashagoruv River valley, partly swallowed by peat, its exposed stones a mixture of shapes and sizes suggesting considerable age and considerable patience on the part of whoever assembled them.

A cairn of this type is essentially a mound of stones raised over a burial, a boundary, or a commemorative point in the landscape, and they appear across Ireland in numbers that suggest they were once a routine way of marking something significant. What makes the Gurteen example particularly worth attention is its immediate neighbourhood. Around 350 metres to the east lies a multiple-stone circle, one of those arrangements of upright stones that are so characteristic of the Bronze Age landscape in south-west Kerry and west Cork. Some 300 metres to the south-east stands a solitary standing stone. These three monuments, the cairn, the circle, and the standing stone, are close enough to one another to suggest they formed part of a related ceremonial or territorial landscape rather than arising independently, though precisely how they related to one another, and to the people who used the valley below, remains an open question.