The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, which gives it a quietly anomalous quality: a substantial and clearly meaningful arrangement of standing stones that cartography simply declined to acknowledge. From here the bog-covered Emlagh Basin stretches away to the east, and to the north-west the Blasket Islands sit on the Atlantic horizon.

When the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1912, the two uninscribed pillars were still standing, arranged in a rough north-to-south line alongside the cross. Even then, they were relative newcomers to their positions: Maude Delap, the Valentia-based naturalist and observer of local affairs, had noted in 1911 that the stones had only recently been raised to where they stood. The taller of the two pillars measured six feet ten inches, or about 2.1 metres, according to Westropp's account; it now lies prostrate roughly 2.5 metres west of the cross and measures 2.9 metres in length. A short row of low upright stones, around 2 metres in overall length, sits just to the east of the cross, adding a further layer of arrangement to the site whose original purpose remains unclear. Delap also recorded the local tradition that the two pillar stones mark the graves of men baptised at this spot by St Brendan, the sixth-century monk from Kerry whose legendary Atlantic voyage became one of the great travel narratives of early medieval Europe. Adding a further complication to the site's biography, a bronze sword was found somewhere near this location in the nineteenth century and is now held in the National Museum of Ireland, catalogued under an 1893 accession number.

The combination of early Christian association, possible pre-Christian stonework, a missing smaller pillar, a displaced giant slab, and a Bronze Age weapon in the vicinity makes this a place where the layers of the past have become thoroughly entangled with one another, and not entirely legibly so.