These are clearance cairns, the accumulated evidence of past agricultural labour, piles of stone gathered by hand from ground that someone once intended to farm. Their sheer number across the slopes of Barranacullia and Knocknagearagh, however, gives them a cumulative weight that is harder to dismiss.

In 1996, Diarmuid O'Keeffe documented around seventy cairns on the south-western slopes of Barranacullia alone, spread across roughly seventy hectares and running more than a kilometre from north to south. The majority cluster along the 700 to 800 foot contour, the elevation band where mountain ground becomes marginally workable. On the opposing south-eastern slope of Knocknagearagh, O'Keeffe identified a further group of approximately fifty cairns across 17.5 hectares, again straddling either side of the 700 foot line. The cairns are built from sandstone rubble, and at least one incorporates quartz alongside the sandstone. What makes the landscape especially legible is the broader context surrounding them: enclosures, probable hut sites, and a field system are all associated with the cairnfields, suggesting that these slopes once supported a settled, working community. One larger cairn on Barranacullia sits apart from the clearance groupings and may represent something different, perhaps a burial monument rather than the byproduct of stone-clearing, though its precise character remains uncertain. The valley below drains northward into the River Suir, roughly three and a half kilometres away near Newcastle.