They are scattered at irregular intervals across both the northern and southern slopes, and they do not fit neatly into any single explanatory category.

The platforms are associated with Sevenchurches, the old name for the Glendalough monastic settlement, and their exact purpose remains a matter of interpretation. The charcoal deposits are the most puzzling detail. A single platform covered in charcoal might suggest a hearth, a burned structure, or a clearing made by fire. Seventy-five of them, distributed across opposing valley slopes, suggests something more systematic, whether habitation by a large community, some form of industrial activity, or land clearance on a considerable scale. Liam Price, writing in 1940, and Healy, cited in 1972, both documented the site, and the consistency of the oval shape and the charcoal layer across so many separate platforms is what makes the site genuinely unusual. Oval platforms of this kind are sometimes interpreted as the levelled bases of timber or wattle huts, structures that would leave little trace beyond the flattened ground itself and the debris of whatever burned there.