What looks, at first glance, like a pair of weathered uprights left over from a field boundary may in fact be something considerably older and more significant: the surviving remnants of an arched gateway, the kind that once marked a formal ecclesiastical entrance.

The antiquarian George Petrie, one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century Irish archaeology, believed these stones to be part of an arched gateway comparable to the famous example at Glendalough in County Wicklow. Glendalough's gateway is one of the few surviving early medieval monastic entrances in Ireland, a relatively rare architectural form in which a stone arch marked the threshold between the secular world and a sacred enclosure. If Petrie's reading is correct, the Rathmichael blocks once performed a similar function, signalling the boundary of an ecclesiastical site in the foothills south of Dublin. Turner, writing in 1985, recorded this interpretation and the site's position on the eastern slopes of Carrickgollogan, a low hill that forms part of the Dublin Mountains fringe running down towards the coast.

The site sits within the Rathmichael area of south County Dublin, a locality with a notable concentration of early medieval remains. Visitors approaching from the surrounding roads should be prepared for a landscape that rewards careful attention rather than dramatic vistas. The stones themselves are easy to overlook if you are not specifically looking for them, and knowing Petrie's interpretation beforehand changes how they read in the ground. There is no formal visitor infrastructure here, so a good map and some advance research into the precise location on the Carrickgollogan slopes will make the difference between a frustrating search and a genuinely satisfying find.