These are leachta, the plural of leacht, a term for a roughly built cairn or stone structure used as a penitential station in early Irish Christianity. They are not monuments in any grand sense; most are low, weathered, and easy to miss. One is simply a large exposure of natural granite bedrock with hollows worn or worked into its surface. Another is known as the Saint's Bed. A third, north-northwest of the church, is a D-shaped pile of stones barely a metre high, with a plain upright limestone slab set at its centre.

When Francis Joseph Bigger visited and recorded the site in 1896, he found rather more to describe than survives today. One of the leachta was then a flat-topped drystone structure resembling an altar, carrying an upright cross slab and several spherical stones that Bigger identified as praying stones or cursing stones, the latter a category of ritual object, usually smooth and rounded, that could be turned as part of a formal spoken curse. By the time the site was surveyed in the late twentieth century, the altar structure had collapsed to its foundations, the cross had shifted some three metres to the south-southeast, and only two of the cursing stones remained visible. A holed stone nearby, probably the hollowed socket mentioned by both Bigger and James Hardiman writing in 1846, still stands beside it. At another station, to the south of the oratory, Bigger noted several fragments of a cross among the scatter of granite and limestone boulders. None of those fragments can be identified today.

The five stations survive in varying states of completeness, and together they suggest a landscape of ritual use that was layered over centuries around the oratory dedicated to St Macdara, a sixth-century saint whose feast day on 16 July once drew boats from across Connaught, their crews dipping their sails three times as they passed the island.