Beyond the cairn itself, a ring of apparently free-standing stones describes a much wider circle, and the two elements, the inner cairn and the outer ring, do not quite touch. That gap between them is the puzzle at the centre of this site.

A ring-cairn is a prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monument in which a rubble cairn, rather than a single large capstone, forms the body of the structure. The Ballyfolan example measures ten metres across and rises to about a metre in height. Around it, at a diameter of sixteen metres, the outer stone circle survives at least along the southern and eastern arc. The arrangement was recorded by Price and Walshe in 1933, and it remains one of the quietly overlooked prehistoric monuments in a county that tends to draw attention further north towards the more visited upland monuments of the Wicklow Hills. The slightly ambiguous relationship between the cairn and the outer ring, described as "apparently free-standing", suggests the two elements may have been constructed separately, or at least conceived as distinct, though what ritual logic governed that separation is not something the stones have given up.