They could be the accumulated debris of generations of farmers clearing the notoriously stony Burren landscape, or they could be something else entirely: penitential stations, points along a ritual circuit where the devout would pause, pray, and move on. That ambiguity is part of what makes them interesting. They are not dramatic features; most are barely knee-high. But they occupy a charged piece of ground, and at least one of them carried a very specific function within living memory of its recording.

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 practice of circumambulation that placed the mound at the centre of the community's funeral rites. This cairn is almost certainly the one marked simply as "Carn" on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. By the time Annabel Swinfen published her study of Burren church sites in 1992, the practice had already disappeared from local memory. Westropp also reported, in a separate paper from 1906 to 1907, that a cist, a stone-lined prehistoric burial box, was said to be covered by a cairn somewhere in the Carran townland, though no such structure is visible in any of the five surviving mounds. One of them, recorded in detail by Dowd, Crumlish, and O'Gorman in a 2007 landscape survey, is a slightly oblong mound measuring up to 5.7 metres east to west and between 0.3 and 0.4 metres high, built from relatively large stones and marked by an upright limestone slab, 0.85 metres tall, set into its southern edge. The slab introduces a deliberateness that field clearance alone does not quite account for.

The cairns sit on level ground overlooking the Poulacarran Valley to the east, with Carran Church and its graveyard close behind them to the north. Visitors approaching from the church will find the mounds scattered across open grazing, easy to overlook at first glance but worth pausing over once you know what you are looking at, particularly the one with the standing limestone slab, which gives the otherwise modest heap a faint air of intention.