They are unassuming enough that a visitor could walk past without a second glance, yet their presence raises the quiet question that attends so many such features in the Irish landscape: what, exactly, is buried here?

The pair are contiguous, meaning they press against one another rather than standing apart, and they differ slightly in scale. The northern mound measures roughly nine metres east to west and six metres north to south, rising to about one and a half metres. Its southern companion covers a similar footprint but stands only around seventy centimetres high and is less clearly defined at its edges. Tim Robinson, who mapped Inis Oírr in 1980 with extraordinary care and detail, recorded their position at the northern end of a field. Without excavation, the mounds resist confident classification. They could be the remains of a burial monument, a collapsed field clearance, a structural ruin, or something else entirely. On an island this size, where layers of human activity going back millennia are compressed into a small limestone surface, ambiguity is almost the norm.