They look, at first, like ancient burial mounds, and the suspicion that they conceal something older is not entirely wrong. One researcher, Curran, argued that the larger cairn covers the ruins of a small oratory, and that the smaller one conceals a clochán, a type of dry-stone beehive hut associated with early Irish monasticism. But the cairns have been growing for centuries from a very different source: the accumulated small stones left by pilgrims performing rounds, the traditional circuit of prayer made at each monument in turn. Whatever structures may lie beneath, the cairns are now at least as much devotional as archaeological, shaped as much by faith as by time.

The site is known as Kilgobnet, or Cill Ghobnait, and its dedication is to St. Gobnait, a sixth-century Irish saint whose feast day falls on the 11th of February. The enclosure itself, roughly 19 by 18 metres internally, is defined by a low bank that still stands up to 1.1 metres in places, intermittently faced with stone, and entered through narrow breaks at the south-east and west-south-west. The two flat-topped cairns together fill much of the southern half of that space, each roughly the size of a large garden shed, rising to about 1.65 and 1.7 metres respectively. Outside the smaller enclosure sits a larger, roughly square one measuring around 47 by 48 metres, its interior marked by old cultivation ridges and the barely-there foundations of three or four possible house sites, their walls reduced to low earthen banks. About 100 metres to the south-west, a stone cross less than a metre tall is set on a small platform of drystone masonry and natural rock outcrop, positioned on the face of a large rock outcrop. Further west again, approximately 120 metres from the cross, lies Tobar Ghobnait, a holy well associated with the same saint.

The rounds performed at Kilgobnet, moving between the enclosure, the cross, and the holy well, continue to this day each February 11th. The route connects monuments that span different phases of use and different kinds of religious memory, from whatever early Christian structures the cairns may or may not conceal, to the accumulation of stones left by every pilgrim who has passed through the narrow gaps in that low bank since.