Cairns, in their simplest form, are mounds of heaped stones, and these particular examples occupy an ambiguous position that makes them quietly compelling: they may be little more than field clearance piles, the accumulated debris of farmers moving stones off grazing land across many generations. Or they may be something older and more deliberate. The uncertainty itself is the interesting part.

The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing between 1900 and 1902, noted that south of Carran Church stood a small cairn around which coffins were carried, a ritual circuit of the kind once common at early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland. This funerary practice, still alive enough in Westropp's time to be recorded, had apparently died out by 1992, when Annabel Swinfen made no mention of it in her study of Burren church sites. Westropp also reported, in a separate paper from 1906 to 1907, that a cist, a prehistoric stone-lined burial box, was once covered by a cairn somewhere in Carran townland, though no such burial feature is visible in any of the five cairns today. Some of them, particularly the one to the south-east of the graveyard and one to its west, may have served as penitential stations, stopping points used in devotional circuits around the church. One cairn recorded in detail by researchers Dowd, Crumlish, and O'Gorman in 2007 is roughly circular, about four metres in diameter and one metre high, built from relatively large limestone slabs. A single upright stone, 0.6 metres tall, stands at its southern edge, giving it a purposeful quality that field clearance alone does not easily explain.

The cairns sit in open rough grazing to the south and west of Carran Graveyard, which itself lies just south-east of Carran Church. The graveyard wall is visible from the cairns, and the relationship between the two is easier to read on the ground than on a map. The upright slab on the southern edge of one cairn is a useful detail to look for, small but distinctive against the surrounding limestone terrain of the Burren.