The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, which gives it a quality of quiet obscurity unusual even by the standards of Kerry's densely layered early medieval landscape. From this modest elevation, the Atlantic opens out to the north-west, and the Blasket Islands sit on the horizon.

The pillar stones were not always prostrate. When the antiquarian T.J. Westropp visited in 1912, they stood in a roughly north-south line. Before that, Maude Delap, the Valentia-based naturalist who also took an interest in local antiquities, recorded in 1911 that the stones had only recently been raised to their present position, suggesting the arrangement visible to Westropp was itself a relatively modern intervention. The smaller of the two stones once stood about three feet, or just under a metre, high; it is no longer identifiable among the stones at the site. A short row of low upright stones, around two metres in overall length, lies just east of the cross. Local tradition connects all of this to St Brendan, the sixth-century monk celebrated for his legendary ocean voyages, with the two pillar stones said to mark the graves of men he baptised at this spot. That association, recorded by Delap, may reflect a much older effort to Christianise a site that was already significant. Adding another layer to the place's history, a bronze sword, a type of object usually dating to the late Bronze Age, was found somewhere in the vicinity in the nineteenth century and is now held by the National Museum of Ireland.