What makes Kilcoolaght unusual is the sheer density of them in one confined spot. When the antiquarian R.R. Brash visited in 1879, he found the place described locally as both a fort and a burial ground, and he counted what he called "dallans", upright pillar stones ranging from a foot to four feet in height, packed into an irregular, unfenced circle roughly fifteen feet across. Several of these were inscribed. He noted that the enclosure had clearly once been larger, but had been encroached upon over time, the original earthwork worn down to almost nothing.

Brash also recorded a local tradition that a church once stood on a rectangular patch of untilled ground a few yards from what he called the cilleen, a term for a small burial ground, often associated with unbaptised children or marginal interments. No physical trace of that church survives today. The site has since been tidied into a different shape entirely: sometime in the 1940s, iron railings were erected around a small rectangular area to protect what remained. Scholars had been documenting the stones for some time before that intervention. Hitchcock's manuscript notes and R.A.S. Macalister's 1945 catalogue both recorded eight individual ogham stones at the site, though two of these were later found to join, forming a single stone that had at some point been broken. More recently, one stone appears to have been removed from the enclosure altogether, leaving the collection incomplete in ways that cannot now be accounted for.