They are prehistoric rock art, and one of the three stones originally recorded here has already disappeared entirely from the site.

Cup-and-ring marks are among the most enigmatic survivals of prehistoric carving in Ireland and Britain: shallow, roughly circular depressions cut into stone, sometimes surrounded by concentric rings, sometimes linked by channels or grooves. Their purpose remains genuinely unclear. At Shanacashel, a scholar named Cooke documented the group in 1906, recording a third stone described as roughly rectangular, measuring around 19 inches by 15 inches, and bearing a cup-and-ring motif connected to an unusual subrectangular grid pattern. A later survey drawing of this same stone shows four equally spaced linear grooves radiating outward from the cup-and-ring, with further intersecting grooves covering the remaining surface. The three stones had all been moved from their original positions, displaced during field clearance work at some point before modern surveys caught up with them. Two were left beside the field boundary; the third, the most elaborately carved, was removed by University College Cork. Subsequent fieldwork was unable to locate it at the site at all.

The two remaining slabs lie on the south side of a field boundary that runs roughly northeast to southwest, at about 80 metres above sea level. A gap roughly four metres wide has been made in that boundary close to where the stones sit. Furze, the dense spiny scrub common to this kind of rough Kerry pasture, grows thickly over them, and at least one recent visit found the monument effectively unlocatable on the ground.