But each one is a leacht, a penitential station, where pilgrims would once have stopped to pray as part of a formal circuit of devotion. Leachta (the plural form) are low, carefully arranged cairns or stone platforms associated with early Irish Christianity, functioning as outdoor altars or focal points for prescribed rounds of prayer. What makes the group on Cruach na Cara quietly arresting is how much variety they pack into a small area, and how differently time has treated each one.

When Francis Joseph Bigger visited in 1896 and published his account, three of the four stations were still substantially intact. The most evocative of them, roughly 20 metres northeast of the church, was a flat-topped drystone structure he described as an altar, carrying several spherical stones he identified as praying or cursing stones, along with an upright cross slab. Cursing stones, sometimes called clocha breaca or speckled stones, were turned ritually during certain prayers, their use hovering between devotion and imprecation depending on the tradition. By the time modern surveys were carried out, the altar itself had collapsed to its foundations, defined now only by set slabs along the western side. Two of the cursing stones remain visible, the cross slab has shifted a few metres to the south-southeast, and beside it sits a holed stone, likely the hollowed socket that both Bigger and the earlier writer James Hardiman, writing in 1846, had noted. A fourth station, roughly 15 metres south of the church, is a circular scatter of granite, limestone, and a single quartz boulder across a diameter of about 7.5 metres. The cross fragments Bigger recorded here in 1896 have since disappeared entirely. The northernmost station, a D-shaped cairn about 70 metres from the church, retains a plain upright limestone slab at its centre. A second station uses a natural granite outcrop, its flat surface already bearing small hollows and rounded boulders, as though the landscape itself had been pressed into liturgical service.